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Comment by npongratz | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why I feel compelled to mention it, but 1791991 is a prime number.

I was born 17.09.1990, exactly a year off. I grew up with Linux and am eternally grateful to the "scene" surrounding the magazine CDs with - I don't know - like 17 distros packed in together and endless tutorials on each of them.

It's also amusing how many people - my age or so - use Ubuntu as a daily driver these days that never went through the pain of configuring LILO or Broadcom drivers from source in Slackware ;)

I started using Linux in around 94/95. I heard some people say how cool Linux was. So after numerous attempts I got it installed and was booted to a command prompt and asked "What the fuck is so cool about this?"

I would turn out to be love at first sight. I've been using Linux since and I've been working at SUSE for 10 years this Fall.

I remember going to a Linux meetup in downtown Seattle in about the spring of 1993. I was surprised at the large number who attended, probably a couple hundred.

That's pretty awesome.

> the pain of configuring LILO

Thank you, this just made my day. :)

Yeah - I recall that the number of characters printed would tell you where it failed.

I once made a patched LILO that would print LOL instead of LIL when the second stage bootloader barfed.

Don't forget xf86config and other X11 fun to make it work with monitors, before peoples shared settings for popular models.

Yeah - And I bet you also remember those warnings about configuring your monitor wrong could physically destroy it. Fun times! :-)

How did you realize that?

I wanted to verify it too, if you Google '1791991 prime', the search page answers 'Yes'.

Yeah, I indeed Googled it [0]. Wolfram Alpha is also a quick way to verify, just query the number:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1791991

[0] I thought to check because I instantly knew the number was not divisible by 3 (since 1+7+1+1 % 3 = 1), and at that point it's just quicker to look it up than run through the other primes up to sqrt(1791991).

Just use the "factor" program from the command line:

$ factor 1791991

1791991: 1791991

factor prints the prime factors of each specified integer.

Indeed! At least, for systems with GNU Coreutils.

So is 9171991.

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