Social Networking - and Digital freedom

With today's generation growing up with social networks and network-on-the-move-mobiles in their genes, 'my generation' (in the 30s and 40s somethings) are trying their best to cope up with this rapidly changing digital revolution. The hard reality is we will never catch up to the current 'teen' generation mental make-up, but YES - we can try to understand them (emphasis on the word TRY!).


For us, 'History' and 'Geography' meant learning about the Mughals, Freedom Struggle, the continents, oceans, weather and earth behavious. For today's teens - they have to reckon with the WWW first - understand what e-mail is all about (the other day my 14 Year daughter wonder aloud - who needs GMail when she already is living her life with Facebook!), what a simple HTML page meant to us in those days, how we were wonder struck with desktop machines, Win32/95/XP etc., ofcourse along with a dose of the old 'History' and 'Geography'.

So we do have have some cribbing to be done - justifiably, specially since some of us as so passionate about Open Source and Freedom. Came across a great blog that seems to reflect all my thoughts - and of course, the author has put it much better than what I ever could do. Do read - a must for Parents who dig digital technology !! :-)

When all else fails in Linux

From  http://www.brunolinux.com/01-First_Things_To_Know/Skinny_Elephants.html


SKINNY ELEPHANTS
( Or: If All Else Fails )


In addition to the PID story in Run-Away Processes If all is blocked and even Ctrl+Alt+backspace ( what should be a last resort ) does not react, if your system does not react on any action ( like I said before, very rare in Linux ) remember the next line:


Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring


Here is how you "raise the elephant":

Alt+SysRq+r  ( The LEFT Alt key ) ( SysRq is on the same button as print screen )
Alt+SysRq+s
Alt+SysRq+e
Alt+SysRq+i
Alt+SysRq+u
Alt+SysRq+b


Give a little time between keystrokes.

The r stands for put keyboard in raw mode
The s for sync the disk
The e for terminate all processes
The i for kill all processes
The u for remount all filesystems read only
The b for reboot the system


THIS IS THE VERY LAST SAVE YOUR BUTT PROCEDURE ! ONLY IF ALL ELSE FAILS !


Bruno


PS: If your filesystem is Ext3 or ReiserFS and on reboot it wants you to do a filesystem check, don't touch any key when it asks you to press "Y" and let it recover the journal automatically.

NOTE: For the skinny elephants to work you need to have the sysrq-key enabled in the kernel. (CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ)
You can check if it is enabled by typing "cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq", if the command returns "1" the sysrq-key is enabled.
If it returns "0" you can enable it with "echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq"