More Fedora Gripes

Every time you boot Linux, there is a stream of information that goes up the screen. It is basically telling you what services (programs that run every time you start the computer) worked, and which had problems. This stuff scrolls up the screen pretty quickly so, someone long ago said "Thou shalt reside in a log file like all useful information that scrolls to quickly or hides from site."

There is a place for this information. All things log-ish reside under /var/log/*. This is great. Things have sensible names like /var/log/boot.log. When one log gets big, it is renamed and a new log starts like /var/log/boot.log, /var/log/boot.log1, var/log/boot.log2... This sounds great until, in Red Hat's case, you try to read one of these boot log files. It is empty. The real data, found only after a google search, is in /var/log/dmesg. Why? No one knows. It is a mystery of the politics of software development.

I did not learn this until my playing around with the script I worked on all day. I would love to sit down and add up all the ridiculous shit I have to put up with regarding computers. Windows is littered with ridiculous shit that was never on a plan until nothing else worked and 'it' was what was left when people stormed out of the conference room.

For years, simple things like where the fucking boot messages go was controllable by the open source community in open source projects. When one mini-despot got to uppity, they were overthrown by the masses and all was good. Now, Red Hat has taken it upon themselves to become Microsoft 2.0 and willingly distribute software that has a growing number of ridiculous shit that just kind of happens all over the place.