Wayne D's Blog

It seems that the default behavior on Linux when it detects an error during the fsck check during boot is to pop out to a shell and tell the user to fix it. This is a really bad idea, if you want to take over the world, fix problems that you can automatically. How many people running Linux these days are competent enough to manually fix a file system? In the past couple of months I have ran across two people who have ended up with auto fsck check failures during the boot process as a result of power failures. Both cases were fixed without incident by running fsck -y after the system had popped out to a naked shell prompt.

The use of windows has dumbed most computer users down to the point where they don't know what to do at a shell prompt, in fact it tends to make them break into a cold sweat. Even Ubuntu 7.10 which is supposed to be Linux for Windows users doesn't try to fix things automatically during boot. Maybe the new version does but I doubt it.

Done ranting.