It seems somebody (Evangelos, Tobias, who else?) completely misunderstood the "compat symlink" idea for a smooth upgrade path. 1) The symlinks are only there for a smooth upgrade path, and NOT supposed to be a part of the package. The user is supposed to be able to delete them after adjusting the bootloader (so, the link should not reappear after every update, like it does right now). Right now, the PKGBUILD says # add compat symlink for the kernel image ln -sf vmlinuz-${pkgname} "${pkgdir}/boot/vmlinuz26${_kernelname}" but this is supposed to be in post_install only. (If we change this now, the compat symlink will be missing on a 3.0-2 -> 3.0.1-1 update, but we will have a clean update path for the 'core' users, which is all that matters) 2) All this makes no sense for custom kernels, it is only for "our" kernels, so that we don't have tons of reports of unbootable systems. Thus, the compat symlink part of post_install should be made such that custom kernel users never execute it. 3) As it is now, new installations will end up with compat symlinks. This is only supposed to be for updates, not for new installations. For this, I originally suggested the following to Tobias (for post_install): loaders="$(find /boot -name syslinux.cfg -or -name extlinux.conf -or -name grub.cfg -or -name menu.lst)" [ -f /etc/lilo.conf ] && loaders="$loaders /etc/lilo.conf" if [ -n "${loaders}" ] && grep -q -e vmlinuz26 -e kernel26.img -e kernel26-fallback.img $loaders; then # compat symlinks ln blablabla fi Please take this into consideration. Regards Thomas