this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Tinkering is all fun and games, until it's 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you're about to execute... And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: "damn, what did I expect to happen?".

Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don't remember all the details, unfortunately.

For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it's units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors... So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.

And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it's contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect... So, I installed glibc from Debian's repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn't have one at the time).

Anyways, what are your stories?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Wanted a cool bootscreen on my Nixos machine - commented out the bootloader to troubleshoot, why my meme-boot-picture wouldn't show - after rebooting, it loaded straight into the BIOS and finally realized what I had done... Was able to fix it thankfully

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Before I understood how to properly build and test mesa (graphics driver), I compiled it and then procedeed to manually symlink the files in the lib and lib32 directories. When I pressed enter on that ln command, the UI immediately crashed and X would no longer start after rebooting the computer. Reinstalling mesa from a virtual terminal wouldn't fix it so I just reinstalled the system. Good times :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I somehow locked myself out of sudo when trying to give my user permission to read serial devices.

Had to reinstall.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Can't say I have any interesting stories. Most of mine are just the head-scratching "I don't know why that didn't work; guess I need to reinstall" kind of story. Like enabling encrypted LVM on install and suddenly nothing is visible to UEFI. Or trying to switch desktop environments using tasksel and now I have a blank screen on next reboot. That lame kind of stuff.

My coworker though... he was mindlessly copy/pasting commands and did the classic rm -rf $UNSETVARIABLE while in / and nuked months of migrated data on his newly built system. He hadn't even set up backups yet. Management was upset but lenient.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Renaming a mount point while mounted was a fun experience in losing data back in the big box Redhat 5.0 days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Relied on an AUR package for building and signing my unified kernel image... one day it was outdated and geberating the image failed, I noticed that by the fact that the system refused to boot my OS. Fixing it was done in a few minutes but boy, that was a shock :D

Guess who also checks the exact output of the kernel rebuild now before rebooting!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The first time I installed Fedora after like a decade I updated to new minor version -> sudo reboot because I was already in the terminal -> reinstalled because it wouldn't boot anymore

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