Linux in the metropolitan buses of Donostia
March 3rd 2007
Today I have taken the usual bus to the city center, and noticed that the monitors they have in the buses, showing general info and commercials, where blank. Well, not exactly blank: some white letters littered the black screens. “Oh, dear” - I thought - “another Windows crash”. Not quite: the messages the monitors where showing corresponded to GNU/Linux!!
Below you can see a photo I took. Click in the picture for full-size version.
I also took a second pic, without flash:
I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures, but taking photos of low-luminance screens in bright ambients, and inside a moving bus is not trivial (and my digital camera is not the best ever).
If one forces one’s eyes, the following fragments can be read:
* search_bg_key: invalid format found in block [...]
* is_leaf: free space seems wrong: level 1
* reiserfs_read_inode2: i/o failure ocurred trying to find [...]
* /home/terminal/datos/backup/20070217-def[...]-md5
* Unable to handle paging request at virtual address [...]
From my ignorance, it seems one hard disk failed, or maybe a connection (say, the USB cable to an external disk) was broken, or a device’s capacity exhausted. Of course, it might well be a failure of the OS (albeit quite unlikely, being GNU/Linux).
In any case, I was shocked to discover that the city council has decided to give Linux a go. Well done, Mr. Elorza!
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3 Comments »
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Julen on 20 Mar 2007 at 11:40 am #
You are the crack! The Floss paparazzi who always has the camera when a computer crashes ;)
This time, as in other ocasions like the ATM with Win98 ;), the computer crashed and you where there taking the picture for all us, the thing that makes this picture special is that it’s really difficult to take a Gnu/Linux crashed computer’s picture… you deserve a Pulitzer.
Congratulations, you got it :)
Iñaki Silanes on 20 Mar 2007 at 12:45 pm #
Mila esker, Julen.
However, notice that I hardly believe that the computer crashed. Rather, I tend to assume that some human/hardware error happened (like “Oops, I forgot to plug in the USB key/external disk!”, or “Oops, I forgot you couldn’t fit a 2GB file into a 1GB hard disk!”, or “Mmm, looks like I shouldn’t have unplugged the USB key before unmounting it”).
sylvainulg on 16 May 2007 at 10:02 am #
my guess is that something like a power failure occured and that some of the device failed to reboot due to HDD state …
otherwise, i don’t see why the device would have suddenly switched to console mode …