Fire in the hole!

Steven Hilton has put together a hilarious but also very relevant map of the battle against the "Empire of Microsoft." Take a look:

Why no non-geeks use Debian…

For example, Debian “stable” still uses Xfree86, and Xfree86 couldn’t detect it’s left nut without editing the Xfree86 conf file.

This explains so much.

Ubuntu tip

As the root account is disabled by default on Ubuntu, you must use sudo to perform admin tasks. It can be a bit irritating to have to constantly append sudo, so you can use this to allowing switching to root via su:

sudo passwd

You will be prompted to a new UNIX password, which will now allow you to use su.

Fsck!

I had interesting experience booting my Debian 3.1 (2.6.14-2 kernel) system. If you’re a *nix user, you probably know what fsck is. If you don’t, click it to read it about on Wikipedia. So just as the system finishes POST, I get the usual “Uncompressing the kernel”, etc. and then:

/dev/hda1: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.

So, basically, Debian wants me to fsck the partition. Well, fsck you, Debian.