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?

  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
    13·
    5 months ago

    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.

      • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
        5·
        5 months ago

        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.