I started mucking around with Slackware Linux on x386 and x486 PCs back in 1992 or 1993 (I think) back in college as it was a suitably CS-major-geek sort of thing to do in my spare time (that and playing Doom when it first came out...lol). In grad school my advisor used SunOS and Solaris and I quickly started using Red Hat Linux at home since that's what the department recommended for installing on PC hardware. I used Linux all through grad school and now I use it almost exclusively where I work. I still need to work in XP and MacOS sometimes though and try to make sure my software runs in all 3 operating systems (Python is a beautiful thing) but Linux is where I'm most comfortable.
My favorite error from a Linux machine was: You don't exist. Go away. What happened was that the /etc/passwd file had become corrupted on the filesystem I was using and when I tried to execute a command, it tried to determine my UID but couldn't. Not knowing what else to do, it insulted me. I could just imagine the greybeard who wrote that thinking "this isn't likely to happen very often, and if it does the machine is probably hosed... I'll make the error message witty"
One final thought... maybe the installer had a few quirks to it, but I've been very happy with Ubuntu's ATI support in general. The drivers went in automatically on my laptop and they worked very well.
My favorite error from a Linux machine was: You don't exist. Go away. What happened was that the /etc/passwd file had become corrupted on the filesystem I was using and when I tried to execute a command, it tried to determine my UID but couldn't. Not knowing what else to do, it insulted me. I could just imagine the greybeard who wrote that thinking "this isn't likely to happen very often, and if it does the machine is probably hosed... I'll make the error message witty"
One final thought... maybe the installer had a few quirks to it, but I've been very happy with Ubuntu's ATI support in general. The drivers went in automatically on my laptop and they worked very well.
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