GOOP, KS - A local resident of Goop was found dead today while trying to install Linux on his home computer.

“He just kept saying, ‘The CD is IN the drive, it’s IN there, now read it!’” says Darryanne Eck, 52, his landlady. “And ‘Header files! What on earth are header files?’ and ‘PRINT, you cursed engine of hell! PRINT!!’ I think he wasn’t having a sunny day.”

Precisely how Filbert Herbert, 34, died remains uncertain. According to numerous messageboards which recieved frantic pleas for help with greater and greater frequency towards the end, Herbert was what is called a “newbie”.

“I just feel so bad for him,” says Larana Kit, administrator of www.linux-is-easy-no-really.com. “I kept meaning to post another reply, but he’d put in so many requests for help already—after 100 or so, I generally help someone else. But I never thought he would die. That’s so unusual. What distro was he using?”

While Kit, short, slender, and almost blonde, radiates compassion, other messageboard administrators take a sterner view. “The little M$ rat deserved to die,” comments Oedipus Growl, 27, administrator of www.death-to-newbies.org. “There are thousands and thousands of manual pages, HOWTOs, and sites out there that he should have read in their entirety before he came whining to us. A computer isn’t a tool. It’s a lifestyle. If you can’t even build a server from scratch, write /etc/printcap in vi off the top of your head first time, or commit a few hundred simple Unix commands to memory, you don’t deserve to use a computer. Your presence taints me.

Local doctors found no signs of violence on the body, which ruled out the possibility of suicide. “It wasn’t suicide,” the body states. The only clues were cryptic notes scattered around the room, such as “cat ls > /dev/lp0—it just keeps blinking” and “make, make!” and “wrong compiler…I can run an .EXE from 1980 but this program dies because its binaries are a year old!”

Though Herbert’s death remains a mystery, some residents feel that what’s important is his legacy. “If only he had one,” comments a local barber.

“No one ever said Linux was easy,” adds Kit.

Herbert is survived by his parents, his siblings, his uncle Mosquito, and his 4th grade teacher, Ellen Sop, as well as most of his other teachers, the rest of Goop, and pretty much everyone else.

NOTE: The Fabricated Press apologizes for the delay in bringing you this news story. This actually happened last March. Unfortunately, our reporter tried to write the story in Microsoft™ Word™. When Word crashed for the fourth time, our IT department thought the problem might be that the computer hadn’t had its Windows™ Update™ in two whole hours. The Update hung the system, but the IT guy restarted a couple times and finally got the Update™ installed on the third try. Then Word™ wouldn’t open at all. Instead, it caused a “General Protection Fault”™ which a passing lawyer misunderstood to be our reporter’s comment on Bush’s post-9-11 record.

Two FBI investigations later, our reporter was again free to pursue this story, but our IT guy had quit before fixing the computer and his replacement was still trying to find an Indian interpreter so he could understand the Support Technician. At last, with a little help from the United Nations, our new IT guy learned that the only solution was to reinstall Windows from scratch, and not our chintzy four-month old version, either, but the latest boxed set, available for roughly the cost of a trip to the Bahamas.

It would have worked, except that our IT guy made the fatal mistake of plugging the computer into the Internet before he had installed all four recommended commercial firewalls. Several viruses waltzed in and wiped the hard drive, fried the motherboard, and cranked the monitor lasers to burn “Don’t Forget, Kerry Has A Plan!” permanently onto the screen. We almost tried again on another computer, but our lawyer advised that this could be a violation of our License Agreement. Meanwhile, our reporter had considered doing the story in pen and paper, but did not want to waste time retyping.

In the end, we hired a Unix specialist, whose fee was roughly the cost of a trip to the Bahamas, to come and set up a secure workstation. It worked. We apologize for the slight delay, and we were even more stressed about it than you were. The whole office will now take a trip to the Bahamas.