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

Linux

48145 readers
915 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
[–] musicmatze@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Not really a "braking my linux setup", but still fun as hell! Back in university, a friend of mine got a new notebook at a time... we spent the night at the university hacking and they wanted to set the notebook up in the evening. They got to the point where they had to setup luks via the cryptsetup CLI. But they got stuck, it just wouldn't work. They tried for HOURS to debug why cryptsetup didn't let them setup LUKS on the drive.

At some point, in the middle of the night (literally something like 2 in the morning) they suddenly JUMPED from their seat and screamed "TYPE UPPERCASE 'YES' - FUCK!!!"

They debugged for about six hours and the conclusion was that cryptsetup asks "If you are sure you want to overwrite, type uppercase 'yes'". ... and they typed lowercase. For six hours. Literally.

The room was on the floor, holding their stomach laughing.