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A QA tester as I know is someone who tests a system till it fails. When I doing some QA testing on a software, I was asked to do whatever it takes to crash the system so that the system engineers could take a look on what had happened and make the system more robust.
Being a little disappointed with how my Windows XP behaved lately, I have changed my home PC OS to Linux. It has been working smoothly todate although the setup of the internet connection was a tough one.
Yesterday, I went to my room and switched on the computer to play some Tamil songs (starting with the song Enna Solla Pogirai). With good song playing in the background, I picked a novel and lay on my bed reading it. Soon after, my son entered the room and started to jump on the bed and quite often on my stomach. I told him not to jump on the bed but he did not listen – he kept jumping. Then I realised that he was actually dancing to the song. So, I grabbed a chair, got him to sit in front of the computer and let him play with the mouse. He was happy because it is not that often I allow him to play with the computer.
As he was “busy” with the computer, I went back to reading the novel. Barely 10 minutes had passed, the music suddenly stopped. I thought my son must have accidentally switched the mp3 player, so I clicked on music files to restart it. It fails to start. After trying for couple of minutes without a success, I decided to restart the Linux.
When the PC restarted, the Linux was loading but halfway through it stopped. So, I ran it in a recovery mode and it stopped with message “root files damaged”. I was surprised – it could not been due to my son’s clicking of the mouse and pressing of the keyboard that caused the root files to be damaged. I was almost speechless.
Was Linux that sensitive? Or my son discovered a bug that people at Ubuntu Linux missed out? I do not really know the cause but what I know is that to get it running again is going to take a long time – especially if I need to reinstall all over again. So, since it was getting late, I switched off the computer and both of us headed back downstairs to watch some kiddies show. The repair of the computer needs to be postponed till Saturday when I have more free time.
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Did you have your account signed in as root? In the root account the wrong click on something can mess your system up. I learned that the hard way when i was trying to be smart and funny to impress a girl i had over with my skills with Linux.
What you want to do is use your user account and save the root account for when do updates or add/remove programs and hardware. You also want to password both accounts too.