The Internet — A global source of practical uses

As Pete Abrams put it on the very first panel of Sluggy Freelance; at least as far as it is a repository of species memory. In these heady days before we regard Google as the new Microsoft, the ability to type in an error message and get a how-to-fix in moments is just amazing.

Like at the weekend, having acquired an old HP workstation with a pre-wiped disk to use as a server, I though I'd be daring and run up Mandrake 10 with a 2.6 kernel. And having installed, got a kernel panic during boot, trying to mount the file system. Yep, known problem, trying to mount a filesystem while the disk drivers are still on the unmounted filesystem. You can fix it with an intermediate RAM-disk stage, but I took the simple route and just backed off to a 2.4 kernel instead.