Found out the hard way that if you edit /etc/sudoers with anything other than visudo you best be absolutely sure the syntax is correct, otherwise sudo will refuse to read it and you’ll be locked out.
Also learned to add -rf to the rm command at the end, after I re-read it to make sure it does what it should do. Something like rm /path -rf instead of rm -fr /path. That protects you from your fat fingers hitting the enter key half way through.
Been there with sudo. Fortunately, su still works, as well as going to another tty and logging in as root. Well, as long as the root login is enabled; otherwise that old hack with init=/bin/bash may work, unless you’ve prohibited editing kernel cmdline in the boitloader or decided on efistub
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?”.
Nah, that’s when the fun really starts! ;)
The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos.
:D That one is a classic. Most distributions don’t include packagers from other distros because 99% of the time it’s a bad idea. But with Arch you can do whatever you want, of course
My two things:
I’ve heard about some new coreutils (rm, cp, cat… this time the name really fits the contents :D) and I decided to test it out. Of course it was conflicting with my current coreutils package and I couldn’t just replace it because deleting the old package would break requirements. So without thinking I forced the package manager to delete it “I’ll install a new one in just a second”. Turns out it’s hard to install a package without cp, etc :D
I don’t remember what I was doing but I overwrote the first bytes of hdd. Meaning my partition table disappeared. Nothing could be mounted, no partitions found. Seemingly a brick.
Turns out, if you run a rescue iso, ask it to try and recognize partitions and recreate the table without formatting, Linux will come back to life as if nothing happened
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good in a VM or a server, but it’s the worst Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had.
Apt sucks, it’s the worst package manager imo (and I use Gentoo). Slow, bad a dependency resolution and apt-autoremove nuked my system both times I tried to use debian.
It’s old. LTS is only good for servers, you cannot change my mind and I don’t see a reason to use sid or unstable, when I can use literally why other distro with a better prepare manager.
And it just does some bizarre things, like not setting up sudo with the graphical installer…
Back in the day I was also dual booting windows and Ubuntu but windows was messing with the system clock.
Then I decided to just have a windows VM to be able to backup my iPhone (not my own choice😞), but I’d want to replace that VM by a MacOs so that at least I learn how to use a new system since I have to keep using windows at work anyway.
The community is a big plus on Linux and you always find someone ready to help you.
I also love the spirit of Linux where you rely way less on big corporations.
Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most “funny” fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.
The monitor didn’t die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.
Back then I was testing modelines to see the maximum I could push to my 14" monitor. I then backed it with a 1200x1600 virtual screen.
My girlfriend got sick from watching me scrolling around and bought me a 19" display which could do that resolution - and ended up frustrated when I added a larger virtual screen.
Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.
The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it’s spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.
The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.
My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.
And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.
Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.
Bonus round
Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.
I was new to Linux, I made the not so calculated decision to use manjaro as my daily, deleted xorg to in an attempt to reinstall xorg to then hopefully fix the stuttering. Everything went wrong, no display obviously, /boot/ files where corrupt. I now use arch and am wiser
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