What is the fastest way to screw up a Linux installation? I read somewhere that it is to login as root and execute rm -R /*

Well, I think I have discovered a faster (if not faster, at least easier) way: simply delete the symbolic link libc.so.6. I deleted this link (I will not go into the reasons why I did this), and that was it. No command worked after that. I rebooted, hoping that my problems would disappear, only to find that init will not work without libc.so.6, either.

Some time ago, I had made a boot floppy for just such an emergency, but I learned the painful truth that the boot floppy will only work with a functioning root file system, which I was lacking because of the libc.so.6 file.

The next line of attack was to replace my current hard disk with an older one which also had a (still intact) Linux installation. The idea being that I would boot using the root file system in this hard disk, then mount the new hard disk as yet another file system and recreate the symbolic link. This plan almost worked; but the mount command had other ideas: it refused to recognise the new hard disk's file system (vfat). I think this has something to do with either a) the kernel being 2.20 or b) my old installation was also somewhat broken (I was getting a lot of messages from modprobe about modules.dep missing).

To cut a long story short, I ended up doing two Linux installs (one for each hard disk). The cost: staying awake until 2 AM and the loss of about 400 MB of downloaded files which were reformatted out of existence. You live and learn...