I would love to hold your hand through compiling a kernel, but I think that you can find out how to do it. My attempt to help here is telling you that if you start messing with what is pre-packaged and what is not, you will be spending your time trying to adhere to what some _evolving_ distribution is doing. Maybe this is an opportunity to learn, regardless of which way yo ugo. My technical piece of advice is: 0. Try what I suggest in a VM first! (No, the full hardware on the bare metal system is not testable this way, but upgrading a kernel is, and you should try it that way FIRST.) 1. Learn how to recover a dead system, in the sense of booting up a system using an installation CD, dropping in files from a backup, installing GRUB by hand. (It is easy for me, and the best piece of advice I have is to make become easy for you.) 2. Download the kernel sources you want, and go to the right place (/usr/src) and do the 'make config' and all of that, or 'make menuconfig', whatever seems good for you. And then put the new kernel in /boot with its shiny new name, and different from the existing one. (It all starts with navigating to /usr/src/linux-3.0.0 and reading the README. Really...) 3. Modify your GRUB (if GRUB, just edit the grud.conf, if GRUB2 follow the automated script or hack the grub.conf, which is what I have done) to make a duplicate of what you are now booting and just change the kernel to the new name. (Send me your grub.conf via email and I will edit it for you.) What should happen is that you will reboot and have a new option to boot. Everyone should know how to do this, and it is worth your time.