Last night a distro saved my life…

This is how you find out how the open-source economic system works.
My ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ stalled. I suspected a Firefox memory leak, not a good guess as I had recently upgraded to 2.0.0.1 (and recovered the fox logo, thanks to the mozilla foundation). A quick Google told me that this was not the case, but I suffered from the « upgrade to edgy and hibernate swap uuid problem ». A quick nano /fstab to recover my swap uuid, copy/paste in /etc/instramfs-tools/conf.d/resume, followed by update-inistramfs -u -k $(uname -r) did the trick (well, it’s all described in French ubuntu wiki).
Alas, poor Yorik, my machine refused to restart on reboot.
NO sweat, I rebooted, fschk kicked in, solved a few (!) issues… and made my day !

    Conclusions:

  1. Imagine THAT with another OS…
  2. When they say that some distros are for geek only, it is true. I am lucky to have installed a flavor with plenty of autodetect fs checks at bootup AND a huge userbase which contributes to many forums & howtos
  3. I use Ubuntu since 5.04, after some tries at Knoppix, Easylinux and Debian (yes, in that order). I never gave a dime to anybody (well, free as in beer also…). Because I didn’t feel why I should. This is probably a cultural issue with us multicultural expats, never at ease in our country (another story…). Now I know why I will donate. Donate few, donate often, donate to many. To wikipedia, to ubuntu, to EFF, to whoever gives to the community without expecting the community to give back, but who still has a life to live, kids to feed, house to pay…