this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
309 points (96.7% liked)

Linux

48313 readers
834 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Nooo I have so many.. This one I can explain in English:

Xubuntu but blind

So, this is ~2016. Ubuntu is hip and a handful of my students use it. On my PCs I only use Debian and Suse. So to help them better I take out an old ASUS laptop and install Ubuntu on it. Try out Xubuntu instead.

At that time I was also huge into alternative keyboard layouts. I had a slightly modified Neo keyboard layout installed when I switched to Xubuntu.

Here the fun starts because the obscure internal graphics card built into the laptop didn't have driver support under Xubuntu. Black screen but I could hear it working. This was the hardest driver fix I ever did. No monitor and a keyboard layout I wasn't used to, under a Linux distro I wasn't used to. And I also was at the university library, so no hardware support or Debian stick in reach.

[–] YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How did you do it with no monitor?

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I did have a smartphone, so I was able to look up several steps I could try. For example installing an experimental driver. In the end I had to install kubuntu and purge xfce, since they had a working driver in their library.

Since I had to type in all commands blindly the worst part was obviously wondering if I mistyped somewhere or if it just didn't work. When I lost track I used the beep command to check if I was stuck.

[–] YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

Thats nuts!!! I can't believe you rescued that.