this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Lord Of The Rings Memes
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What is actually happening to the computer in the image?
It's a busybox prompt, which normally looks like this:
(Image source)
busybox is a set of minimal space saving command line tools (really just one executable linked to with various names, that immitates basic tools when called with that name, eg. it echos when called as echo or cats when called as cat etc.) and it's commonly provided in the initial ramdisk loaded at boot of various Linuxes. If the boot fails after liading it, you get this to diagnose the problem and maybe even fix it. Now what happened here is that additionally the output is garbled up. It's either the memory that holds the console font, the console font definition on disk (may be in the kernel or a module), the graphic cards memory or maybe even the display/terminal. In one of those components the bits for the font didn't take the correct values or lost them again. Therefore the text gets displayed with wrong characters.
Well I learned something about busybox today.
Also wanted to add that this happens when you cat binary. Not that I’ve ever done that of course.