I have seen the future.

The best part is that Fred Jr, there, seemed to be flattered by the attention, and the women were swarming with the "OMG TEH FAGZ! We must protect our precious heterosexual or he will be IMMEDIATELY TEMPTED INTO IRRETRIEVABLE SIN!" attitude

From:

lurkerwithout.livejournal.com

"God hates Crippled Soldiers"?

Even for a Phelpsian sign that was a WTF? moment...

(deleted comment)

From:

I'm really surprised nobody's just plugged him yet. We live in a messed up world where martin Luther King Junior gets shot in the head but nobody even aims at Phelps.

From:

matgb

I noted the ebay uk thing, and looked at the url. ex-parrot server. Should've known.

Very cool though.

From:

jirel.livejournal.com

I admidt to using my neighbor's wireless - my cable occaisionally goes down. When it does, I just flip over to wirless and check for open networks. I figure anyone dump enough to leave it open deserves it. As soon as my cable goes back up, I go back to cable.

From:

elffin.livejournal.com

The "Geek deals with Neighbors Stealing Wireless" story left me laughing hard. Oh shit I never throught of doing that and it's wonderfully creative. I just logged the pr0n sites they were going to for possible later leverage.

From:

cmseward.livejournal.com

Since nobody else has really asked this, I'll bite: *why* were you typing rm -rf?

From:

Because I wanted to reinstall the entire system, from scratch, with a different flavour, and no matter what the boot order is set to in the BIOS, on this machine if C is bootable then it boots from C first, period.

No, I don't know why.

But I had to make C unbootable, and this seemed like the most stylish way to do it.

From:

Remove the drive from the BIOS. Don't disable the IDE controller, just set the drive to NONE. The BIOS will then boot from CD, but Linux, *BSD, Solaris x86, and Win NT/2000/XP all ignore the BIOS once they've booted and probe the hardware themselves, finding drives that the BIOS doesn't believe in.

From:

Good to know for next time.

From:

The asterisk after the slash is gratuitous, and will mean you miss files and directories beginning with a period.

`rm -rf / &` is what you're looking for. You need it so when your shell disappears (you know, the dynamically linked one that makes your life hell when there's a problem with ld, which there tends to be when critical system binaries and libraries start disappearing) the rm process keeps running.

From:

In his defense, if you're performing this command missing the dot files is the least of your worries. It's the last thing you'll be typing in that bash prompt for a while either way.

From:

Well, John appears to have reached his limit with being willing to put up with Linux's shit, if I'm reading the above correctly in context with his recent posts. That or he's being sarcastic about having intentionally logged in as root and explicitly running that command, relaxedly, and my normally otherwise flawless Spidey Sense in this area has failed me.

From:

I'm being paid to put up with it's shit, so I haven't hit my limit yet. I just needed to change distributions on a system where you CAN'T boot from anything but C as long as C is bootable, no matter how the BIOS is set.

From:

giza.livejournal.com

mv /* /home Time taken is based on the number of files and directories in /, which is usually no more than two dozen.

Or, to trash the bootloader along with one or more superblocks: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd[abcd] bs=64M, where a, b, c, or d is the letter of your hard drive. If in doubt, just try them all. :-)

Um.... not that I did the moving of root's contents into /home accidentally in years past or anything.

From:

that would be sad. I'm not sure that linux really has "shit" to give, though certain distros have their fair share. I love it, myself. I could, under the right circumstances, be convinced to use OSX, but I'd certainly never be talked into running windows again (at least not as my primary OS, though it's nice for games).

From:

I'll remember that for next time.

For this time, all I *really* needed to do was make /boot unbootable. The rest was all just gravy, because I was about to repartition anyway.

From:

I just normally newfs a parition I want to nuke, but rm -rf has a certain appeal if you're feeling vindictive. I'll admit to having done it. It will fail once /etc/passwd gets wiped though no matter what. Even root has no ability when the OS no longer knows who UID 0 is.

From:

I was deeply annoyed at the time.

For the record: I now officially hate Ubuntu server. Adding X to it is damn near impossible (without just converting to Ubuntu Deskstop). Installing Ubuntu Desktop and then removing the extra stuff? That's easy, and it gets you the penguin cannon game, too.

From:

everbloom.livejournal.com

That game is awsome. I have to remove it from my menu though, or my sister hijacks my computer.

From:

I love server, but I've never had to add X to it. I would go that second route, myself. Removing seems easier than adding where apt is involved.

From:

Adding X to it really is a painful experience. As in, I couldn't make it work.

And I wanted X on it because the machine needs to be running that for VNC to work, and it needs VNC so that people can use VMWare on it to emulate a whole pile of XP configurations.

From:

but addingthe ubuntu-desktop would have worked? I wasn't on the Desktop team when it was built, but I suspect that most of the thought put into it was assuming that if someone wanted the desktop it would be the ubuntu desktop. Was the goal to add X without the ubuntu desktop (ie without gnome or kde)? If so, I think just adding gnome is just as easy, unless there are memory issues, though I agree that the spirit of linux seems to be that you should be able to add X alone without gnome and create whatever you want.

From:

Adding ubuntu-desktop would have installed gnome, which does what I want it to.

But since I'd already buggered it up with some other things, I just reset and installed from the Desktop image.

From:

I'm just tying to clarrify. I'm going ot bring it up to the desktop team and the server team and see if we can't get our crap straight.

From:

... apparently I should be directing my Ubuntu questions to you, then. Have you got a Gmail account, with that wonderful Gmail Chat feature?

My problem was that I couldn't *find* any way to install that without installing the rest of the desktop packages.

Frankly, the documentation sucks. All linux documentation sucks, as far as I can tell, because it's all either extremely basic ("Linux treats everything as a file!") or way too complex and never defines its terms. There's never a "This is what it does. Here's some examples. And here's the man file with the six trillion options".

And you really need to know the name of the package you want - if you don't know that, you're kinda screwed - and I have yet to EVER find a package with any useful documentation on it to tell me what it's going to look like and what it's going to do BEFORE having to install it and play with it.

But I'm not bitter. Not at all.

From:

Agreed. We've actually been going over the documentation lately to make it more useful because it blows. And packages are a huge problem. With synaptic you can search by a lot of optional fields and find what you're looking for, but of course that wouldn't have helped you since it's X based software.

I do have a gmail address (anivair at gmail dot com) with gchat, but I'm not on it at work, since I use text based web interface most of the time. Feel free to send me any number of emails, though, since I check that regularly (though I will be out from ten to about one).

I wonder if the documentation we're working on should be ported to server. Command line documentation is always a bigger pain in the butt than X based documentation (due to the limits of the screen, mostly).

From: