this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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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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[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I had rEFInd and GRUB installed entirely by accident, and a botched update for Arch hosed my entire EFI setup making it impossible to boot Linux or Windows w/o a LiveCD. Thankfully it self repaired once I nuked rEFInd. I ended up going back to Ubuntu, but I hate snaps. I still would recommend Arch for most Linux users who want the power windows.

[–] Swagdorf@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I wanted to move my Arch VM to bare metal, so I copied out all the important bits. Then I wanted to move that copy to a new drive so I could boot into it.

I THOUGHT I'd MV all the files in the Arch install's etc directory using sudo MV /etc ...

I also (somehow) mashed my install's etc with Arch's and bungled both, with no live CD to help.

I learned a thing or two about absolute file paths...

[–] Peffse@lemmy.world 3 points 10 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.

[–] ulkesh@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago

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

[–] zako@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

rm -rf /var

I don't know what I was thinking on to type it 😅

[–] drndramrndra@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 10 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

[–] x3i@lemmy.x3i.tech 2 points 10 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!

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