When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot
Bork!Bork!Bork! It's one thing to bare your undercarriage in private. It's a whole other thing to do so on the side of a road, risking the possibility that passing drivers will question your Linux competence.
Sent in by an eagle-eyed Register reader, the borked billboard was spotted in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The billboard appears to have survived the recent storms intact. But the boot process? Not so much.
A billboard showing a GRUB message (click to enlarge)
Many Linux distributions use GRUB (short for GRand Unified Bootloader) to handle system startup. It loads the bare minimum to boot the Linux kernel and usually keeps itself to itself. Unless something has gone a bit awry... as we saw in the case of the "incident on the bus" or here, where a cheery welcome message is shown and then... nothing. The cause could be anything from a corrupted configuration file to a missing boot device.
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"To be fair to the poor sign," our reader noted, "much of the city had been out of power that day due to winds gusting to 92mph (148kph).
"The screen for the other direction was functioning properly however, so that can't be a complete excuse."
Then again, this could be a stripped-down marketing campaign for a local eatery. This is America, after all. "Grub" is a Britishism that made it across the Atlantic intact and can mean some hearty sustenance just as much as it might carry significance for a Linux fan. Or it could refer to the wriggling larva featured in a certain Australia-based celebrity reality television show.
Thankfully, the language of bork is universal. The French might call a Blue Screen of Death écran bleu de la mort, but the BSOD acronym reigns supreme. And here, any lover of Linux, regardless of their country of origin, will know that GRUB making its presence known on a roadside billboard means that somehow, somewhere, an administrator is having a very bad day indeed. ®
