When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

It's one thing to bare your undercarriage in private. It's a whole other thing to do so on the side of a road, risking the possibility that passing drivers will question your Linux competence. Sent in by an eagle-eyed Register reader, the borked billboard was spotted in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The billboard appears to have survived …

[Dave559]

If it has been really windy, maybe the best thing to do would just be to LILO until it’s all blown over…?

[mirachu]

GRUBs kinda LILO by nature.

[Korev]

We should boot you off the board for that one

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an Improvement!

There's something kinda funny about an enthusiastic welcome message being shown when things are broken. It's probably an improvement over what was supposed to be shown, and way better than than an BSOD screen.

[ZedaZ80]

Well you see...

That's actually a new campaign to advertise GRUB; the sign is working correctly. The fact that there is a different sign on the back is actually just how billboards work-- if you are entering a city you might see a billboard advertising a museum for example, but it wouldn't make sense to see that when you are leaving, so they often have different advertisement on either side. Alternatively, and possibly funnier given the context-- many billboards are single-sided, especially if one side isn't visible from a road, so maybe the wind caused the sign to swivel around!

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Well you see...

So maybe it's placed here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grub_Gulch,_California

[Not Yb]

This being a billboard... they may not have remote monitoring on it.

Since running a remote monitoring system costs money, they may not actually connect the billboard to the internet.

The 'system administrator having a bad day' may not know this one isn't working properly until they send someone out to change the display and the tech sees the grub loading display.

[IGotOut]

Re: This being a billboard... they may not have remote monitoring on it.

"Since running a remote monitoring system costs money, they may not actually connect the billboard to the internet."

Nope and nope.

There is plenty of free monitoring software (you check to see if a service is running, rather than ping) and it may not be on the internet, but it's sure as hell going to have some sort of remote connection to the main company. Otherwise someone has to drive to thousands of billboards to.update them.

Of course you may have meant remote low level management software.

[Steve Davies 3]

ROFL with this:-

Otherwise someone has to drive to thousands of billboards to.update them

Errr.... how do you think the bilboards were updated BEFORE they became electronic? There is a huge one near me that is still of the old sort. Three men were working on it the other day putting up a new sign for a local estate agent.

[VicMortimer]

Re: ROFL with this:-

They still do that here.

My city didn't manage to ban billboards entirely, they just banned new ones going up.

But they did manage to ban electronic ones early enough that none got installed and grandfathered.

[Not Yb]

Re: This being a billboard... they may not have remote monitoring on it.

Something has to be connected to somewhere. That thing requires money, or at least power and the right radio design to run. There's no such thing as "free monitoring software" that works on something that isn't connected somehow via wire or radio... And billboard companies have been "driving to thousands of billboards to update them" for decades now. Not weekly, but most of them change their 'manually updated vinyl billboards' more often than once a year.

The local billboard company occasionally advertises jobs for people who like to climb, so that is clearly something they still have to do regularly. A firm "no way would they do it this way" is not necessarily true.

I don't personally have experience to know for sure, but I suspect you don't either, so we're both kinda assuming things that might or might not be done this way by an actual billboard company on every billboard they own. Aside from the manual billboards, which I know get changed by hand on a regular basis, anyway.

[Xalran]

LILO

Until a few years ago I was still stuck in the world of LILO (the acronym is obvious for the old hands)... then I saw the Light and it was called GRUB.

( ok, I hadn't dealt with Linux installs since the (linux level) Epoch... which should explain)

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: LILO

Some of us 'old hands' can still remember the bootloader instructions that we'd set into the front panel switches to load them into ram before booting the OS.

[lordminty]

Re: LILO

I've still got the scars.

Especially after loading in 4 pages of binary, then messing up a line.

And having to clear the RAM and start all over again.

[O'Reg Inalsin]

Re: LILO

Take your pick - Linux Loader, Last-in-last-out, or Lindsay Lohan. https://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Lindsay+Lohan

[bregister]

Re: LILO

Wasn't there a character in the old TV series "Bread" called Lilo Lill. They were Liverpudlians of Irish descent, I've got the board game.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

kph ?

That is a weird unit... kilo per hour? Kilo WHAT per hour? kilo pounds (of thrust) over one hour? Kilo pascal henry, air pressure depending on inductance? ISO is km/h, 95% of the world uses it..

[Gene Cash]

Re: kph ?

I use km/hour of course.

[mirachu]

Re: kph ?

Kilo Pascal Henry would be kPaH, so not that. It could be kilo pico hour (can't think of a "p" unit off the top of my head).

[Sandtitz]

Re: kph ?

Kilopond hours, of coz.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: kph ?

> kilo pico hour

Wouldn't that be nano hour? Like 3,6 microseconds?

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: kph ?

Kilo pachyderms per hour. Because, you know, Register and all that.

Oh, and it's a measurement of tensile pressure.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: kph ?

No wait, it is the old German "Klos Pro Haus"... Which is toilets per house. Houses with ten families could have none or one in the past, whereas others with one family could have a separate for each family member + 10 guests... An indirect measurement of "rich".

[Tim R]

Re: kph ?

kph is kilophot, the CGS unit of illuminance, 1 kph = 10 Mlx, making for quite a bright surface.

[that one in the corner]

Re: kph ?

kinky people here

No units, no tattling

[DS999]

I bet some people

Thought it was some sort of advertisement for a restaurant.

[LateAgain]

Re: I bet some people

Now that sounds like a feature request.

Customised error message

[Eric 9001]

GNU GRUB is GNU and has nothing to do with Linux

It can execute Linux, but it supports executing many kernels; https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Supported-kernels.html

The endgame is for GNU GRUB to exclusively execute GNU Hurd and progress so far is good; https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/04/01/gentoo-hurd.html

Looks like the hardware has failed to me - as generally otherwise GRUB doesn't get stuck like that (I've only ever seen GRUB get stuck otherwise with broken, unfinished coreboot ports that GNUboot provides for testing for certain boards).

[Eric 9001]

Re: GNU GRUB is GNU and has nothing to do with Linux

How could I forget - if you use Linux with or without an initramfs (initial GNU/Linux or BusyBox/Linux fs in RAM that does things Linux can't, like ask for the root password or mount root=UUID=), if Linux or the initrd fails early during the boot process (for example, Linux failing to find the root partition, as it doesn't support root=UUID=, only root=PARTUUID= or root=/dev/sda1), if the graphics haven't been already inited to a mode handled by Linux, you won't see the panic() message - only the boot screen GRUB left - making it look like GRUB hung, when it was Linux that hung.

What probably happened if there wasn't hardware failure, is GRUB went and successfully executed Linux, which failed to boot and also failed to set the video mode needed to print the kernel panic().

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: GNU GRUB is GNU and has nothing to do with Linux

I remember the time when that happened regularly when adding of removing data HDDs. In early SATA days even more, since the cable did not dictate a clear /dev/hda1 any more, it was all /dev/sdX1, with some BIOSes reordering depending on the moon phase. (Hence the "fix" with EFI style and UUIDs later, which is fun if you copy the data of your root partition to the newer faster drive, but not the partition as-is. And if you do it with the partition as-is, taking over the UUID into the gigantic partition table, be careful to unplug your old drive, else you will have double...)

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: GNU GRUB is GNU and has nothing to do with Linux

I also thought it would be ironic if grub was booting Windows for the signage software.

Years ago I had laptop dual booting Win7 and Linux. The Win7 mostly for testing but eventually the Linux was not used (a newer lappy) and the Linux partitions were reused by the Win7 install.

Rather than stuff about with the Windows bootloader, I left grub doing the job. As the Linux /boot was reasonably large I installed busybox and other software and kept it as a rescue partition.

Essentially a Win7 system booted (chainloaded) from Grub.

In this case I would guess neither Linux, Windows or whatever are to blame… more likely repeated abrupt disconnections from the power supply has trashed the storage (ssd, disk, sd card, or horrible but true even a usb flash drive.)

Often the boot sectors are still readable but the rest of device has passed over.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Grub" is a Britishism that made it across the Atlantic intact and can mean some hearty sustenance

Is it really used outside rather dated fiction? The only person I can remember using it IRL was my late father-in-law.

[Anonymous Coward]

'Yer Grub's ready', is normal get to table cry in UK.

My wife cries "Yer Grub's ready' Quite normal indication to come to the table in UK.

[Korev]

Not "Britishism", English!

[Bill Gray]

Yank here. I think it would indeed be considered somewhat dated, but would be known to most USAians.

[Sandtitz]

GRUB alternatives

"Yank here. I think it would indeed be considered somewhat dated, but would be known to most USAians."

Would CHOW (Comprehensive Hardware‑Oriented Workloader) be more modern to Yanks?

Or perhaps SLOP (System Loader and Operation Processor)?

[VicMortimer]

Is it really a Britishism at all?

Maybe it's my bad memory, but it sounds more "old west" to me.

[that one in the corner]

The "old west" had more bowler hats than ten gallons, so they probably were still using the English they brought over as well.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Now there's more ten Gallon hats on two pint heads.

[jiho]

Funny you should say that

This is both amusing and ironic for me. In my recent testing of NetBSD/amd64 10.1, its UEFI bootloader has failed more often than succeeded. I've thrown in the towel and use GRUB instead.

[gosand]

I fondly (ok, maybe not) remember LILO, but GRUB is pretty familiar - and largely out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

I recently saw this story posted about Ubuntu stripping out functionality https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1s3fhmz/ubuntu_proposes_bizarre_nonsensical_changes_to/

After reading through this, I came to find out that some people use other things like rEFInd, limine, systemd-boot.

GRUB works just fine for me, I don't see a need to change it, but in the Linux world there is always change and/or progress depending on your perspective.

I also recently found and implemented Clover in order to boot from PCIe. I wanted to set up a home NAS, and am using an old i3 system with no NVMe slot. It boots to a 128GB NVMe drive nestled in an adapter card plugged into the PCIe slot. Booting Clover from a USB drive makes this possible.