A Linux BSOD

*sigh*

While my Linux machines weren’t affected, some Ubuntu Linux users had a rude awakening a week and a half ago. Seems an experimental update to Ubuntu Linux was posted for download. result? BSOD and a broken GUI–only the command line was available. For a Linux distro that is designed to appeal to the proverbial “Aunt Tilly” (a complete computer naif), that was disastrous. Fortunately, users didn’t have a monolithic foot-dragger like M$ to turn to, and the bad patch (which was never supposed to have been posted to begin with) was very quickly nuked, a fix was promptly published and an internal investigation fired up, with promises of transparency.

Now, I wasn’t caught because, having been well-taught by years of buggy M$ downloads/patches, I don’t do OS or application patching w/o checking out how it’s affected others, first. I haven’t had time until today to run down the latest patches offered for Ubuntu Linux, so I didn’t approve installation of the buggy experimental, wrongly posted patch.

Just luck… resulting from my justifiable paranoia (well, and the fact that only one of the Linux boxes is an Ubuntu box*).

๐Ÿ™‚

But, it woulda been fun getting a BSOD on a Linux box of any kind, especially on a non-production/mission critical machine. (The fix was simple: a coupla command line entries and bob’s your uncle, so no big deal, really… except for “Aunt Tilly” eh?)

So, anyone capture a pic of the Ubuntu BSOD for me to use making a wallpaper?

๐Ÿ™‚

*BTW, I have mentioned before, haven’t I, that I’ve built my Linux boxes from bits and pieces of dumpster computers, right? Yep. Great performance from pieces of junked computers slapped together. Nice.

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