After flirting with tech from 1989 onwards, Sam Varghese began to experiment with Linux in 1998. A couple of years later, he began using the Debian distribution as a single-boot system for his personal use. From that point onwards his interest grew and he has since written widely about free and open source software, with a great deal of his writings based on his own experiences, rather than anecdotal evidence. Open Sauce will focus on a genre of software that is present everywhere but rarely acknowledged; a genre that has little eye-candy but does most of the heavy lifting; a genre that is designed and written by people whose accomplishments are only occasionally recognised. Above all this blog will follow the KISS principle - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Automatix lands a Linux user in trouble

by Sam Varghese

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Page 1 of 3 ! There are times, even at my age, when I feel like going out on the road and kicking the first dog that passes by. The last two days have been like that - I feel as though I've really lost something. A few days back I was exultant over the fact that I had helped a man whom I believe to be balanced in his assessment of operating systems - iTWire editor Stan Beer - and assisted him in taking his first steps on the road to experiencing the myriad benefits I've enjoyed by moving from Windows to Linux. But Stan has had far too many problems with instability on his Ubuntu system. Finally things came to the stage where the box just wouldn't get past the stage where it enters the GRUB boot menu. Hence he has had to put his Linux plans on hold. Damn! I'm disappointed and bloody annoyed as well. More so, because we've found the culprit - and it's got nothing to do with Linux. When I heard about it on Sunday, I felt really down. Stan wrote: "Over the past week my Ubuntu system began to grow increasingly unstable (increasingly frequent system freezes requiring cold reboots) until suddenly on Friday (November 16) without warning it suffered an recoverable crash. Each time I tried to reboot, the process would abort telling me that I had errors in sectors of my partition and that it had tried to run an automatic fsck which failed. It would then leave me at the command line and tell me to enter fsck manually to fix the problem - which I did. The result was that the system on booting now simply hangs during the command line part of the booting process." << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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