I particularly like this one error I got in one of my ubuntu installs:

"The program 'apt-get' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: apt-get install apt"

A friend told me about once receiving a BIOS error like the following:

Error: No keyboard detected. Press any key to continue.

I got this one yesterday on a brand new Dell.

"No keyboard present. Press F1 to continue or DEL to enter setup..."

I imagine they could still be entered through the serial console, though.

My Favorite:

In an early version of Linux I used to get "Mr. Potato Head is on the loose!" every once in a while...

Pretty funny. I don't think anything will ever top the simple 'printer on fire', though.

Give 'em credit for making progress, they don't have a "Reboot Computer?" button as the default selection ala: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86329

My favorite one was "Non-System Disk or Disk Error". It seems subtle, but it had everything:

1) Doesn't make any sense.

2) Doesn't point to a solution.

3) Isn't really an error.

4) Completely prevents the computer from working.

5) Happened routinely--millions of times a day, I'm sure.

6) Seemed to infect pretty girls the most, allowing me to heroicly solve the problem (by ejecting the diskette from the drive during boot up.)

Good times.

It's a pathetic error message but it does make sense I think. The computar tried to boot a disk but it wasn't a (bootable) "system disk" or it is a system disk, but it's broken.

Specifically, it's pathetic because it's grammatically ambiguous and requires additional knowledge.

It could easily be parsed grammatically as, "There was an error on the non-system disk or the disk" which makes no sense. Even when you parse it the way it was intended, you need to know that the PC tried to boot from a disk drive in order to comprehend the message.

Pretty much sums up my entire history with Windows.

How else could I explain my love of Gentoo? It's transparent in comparison.

Marc is still pissed at MS after these years. What a passion & commitment Marc.