Linux novices like me probably shouldn’t be allowed to even play with their Linux boxes. Such computers are simply doomed to live like cats, always dying and coming back to life. Mine has dies and been resurrected, by my count, four times now. It’s just died again, and is waiting for me to resurrect it again.

This time, I know exactly what I did wrong. In an attempt to free up some space in my root directory, I decided to move all of my command files to a big chunk of unused space on another partition. I’d done it before with some other code libraries; why shouldn’t it work this time?

Well, I discovered, it’s something like this. You can mess with the ignition in your car all you want, but disconnecting the wires from the ignition and reconnecting them to, say, the transmission is not going to make your car work better. In other words, my computer no longer knows how to start up. I can boot into Windows just fine — it’s slightly harder for an inexperienced person to kill Windows than it is for them to kill Linux (although I’ve made a couple of good attempts at this).

Fortunately, I think I can fix this error without too much grief; it will just be time consuming. What I probably ought to do, though, is just reinstall Linux altogether. I’m just not quite brave enough to do that yet. Fortunately for me, all of my files and stories and artwork are on a shared partition, so I haven’t lost any data. What I ought to do next, though, is back up everything onto a CD-ROM. Just in case.

Do you know why Jesus was able to back up his system when it crashed, whereas the Devil was completely lost? It’s because Jesus Saves. Wah ha ha haaa! Ha ha! Ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaa! Sometimes I kill myself, I really do.

So here’s the moral of our tale, something I’m sure will be applicable to your every day life: when messing around with your root account in the root directory on your Linux system, be sure you have backed up your X-server configuration files and possibly established a symlink to your backup directory; because otherwise, none of your system daemons will be able to start themselves at boot time, and your system will be hosed.

For some reason, I suspect Aesop never wrote a fable about that one. Though "How the Ferret Dumped Its System Core" would certainly have gone over well with the ancient Greeks.

That is all. Good night.