I bet there was a granny, reading it line by line and crumple about where the fucking apples at.

ALL SHALL BOW BEFORE THE DARK OBELISK OF TECHNOLOGY.

Some crusty broken distro install with a broken boot that may or may not be due to a bad disk or fs corruption is pretty much as dystopian as it gets.

I'm sure they announce it on their loudspeakers when you're in the store too.

They needed to construct additional pylons.

No idea where it's from or what it usually looks like since I just nabbed this off of Facebook, but my guess is to display ads, or perhaps some slo-mo videos of fresh fruit being tossed in an appetizing manner in an attempt to trigger your Pavlovian reflex to buy some of those oranges.

Couldn't find any pictures of that particular setup operating under normal conditions, but here are some similar ones to give you an idea:

The question is, why does it run on Linux and not Apple

Because flashy screens work on dumb lizard brains

Big Fruit is going to control our minds and enslave us all. If only they could get the interns to configure their shitty Linus distro.

Do you really want an explanation for why a market might want large signage that they can change without much extra labor? Seems self evident to me.

Greed?

Well, it doesn't look like a core dump

It is actually a boot failure. Normally the kernel reads some config from the initrd (the bootloader loads initrd and passes it to the kernel - thanks dan) and then does a bunch of setup stuff, and then it mounts the actual root filesystem, and then switches to using that. In this case, the root filesystem has failed to mount.

Hardware failure is most likely the cause, but misconfiguration can also make this happen. Probably hardware though.

If its misconfiguration, an admin can reattempt to mount the root drive on /new_root, and then ctrl-d to get the init system to try again

ELI5: couldnt open C:/ drive

Edit: clarified what loads the initrd - as per dans comment.

These kinds of public errors are almost always a hard drive failure.

Systemd has a feature to shorten lines too long for the display, which is a pretty stupid idea, as you can see here.

The service failing here would be initrd-switch-root.service.

That's not a kernel panic

Or at the disco.

Or an Adafruit, perhaps?

I haven't seen this thing in action under normal conditions since I just looted the picture off Faceborg, but I imagine it probably shows a slideshow of ads.

You didn't immediately swap the failing drive? I feel sorry for the media server. It was trying it's best