windows update kept downloading these bloated “updates” that included brand new software that I didn’t want or use, broke my settings, added a bunch of spyware, adware and other shit and slowed down my system
installing linux fixed that instantly and permanently
Mine is close to that. I still had a working libc, but the dynamic library for C++ programs wouldn’t load, so most of the Gentoo tools and several other things I expected simply crashed on startup.
Found enough working programs to get the library restored and remove the bad arch flags from my configuration to start another emerge world.
After that, I was pretty confident that I could run Linux at least as confidently as I had previously run WinNT 4.
Generally if you remove a file, it won’t affect programs that already have it open. So if you delete libc, hope that you don’t lose power. If worse comes to worst, you’ll need to pull the drive and mount it on another machine.
Hmm I have come up with a bunch of neat solutions over the years. Where to start?
One time I broke the sudoers file on a distro without a root account, thoroughly locking myself out. I used docker -v /:/chroot to get myself root access to my root filesystem where I fixed the sudoers file. Protip always use visudo
I feel seen here, I was building a Ubuntu server and messed up the firewall settings not being able to get an internet connection, hours of trying to get back to where I was I gave up and plan to just start from scratch next time.
Is there a way of taking system snapshots with Linux?
Back in the day, I upgraded a Slackware install from kernel 1.3 to 2.0. That was a fucking adventure.
The fun part about back then was that if your machine wouldn’t boot or if you couldn’t get your modem or pppd working, you probably didn’t have another internet connected device so you might have to drive somewhere with a computer…or try to figure it out through books.
Yep. I remember at the time I saw a lot of advice saying “you know you might want to seriously consider just installing your distro from scratch with a newer version.” Tracking down all of the dependencies (some of which had to be installed as binaries) was a very manual process.
Edit: Oh and another fun aspect of that time period was that since downloads were so slow on a modem, if you wanted a newer version or to try out another distro, you would go and order a cdrom from a place like Walnut Creek.
/var was almost full and I ran pacman -Syu and left the comp to go and make dinner. This was also at the time Plasma 6 was rolling out.
It was a big upgrade along with a new kernel. Download seemed to go smoothly, but during installation, it didn’t have enough space to unpack stuff and there was no kernel available to boot. Even the “previous kernel” options didn’t work.
It wasn’t too hard to fix because I had learnt how to use pacman in a chroot env, but my dinner got cold by the time I was ready to eat.
I still haven’t learnt the lesson though. This is the third time I am having a problem with paccache and I still haven’t setup a removal daemon/cron job.
At some point I’ve installed rust implementation of the coreutils from the AUR, they worked for a long while until some ssl vulnerability were discovered and everyone had to update the library. As you can imagine, without working coreutils system were hard to use. troubleshooting were also a pain in the ass because who could blame coreutils of all things? :P
At one point, my laptop’s Nvidia drivers were all tangled up. The package dependency graph had portions of the screwy, we-don’t-need-your-stinking-standard-version-scheme, binary blob drivers both in front of and behind the currently installed version. I had to basically gut everything Nvidia related, by performing surgery on the filesystem and Apt database, and then build it back. At one point, I was flying in text mode only; not hard, but worth mentioning since it shows how deep a cut this was.
Related: getting the above nonsense to cooperate with containers that also want to do GPU things. As much as I wanted this work with coding up a one-and-done solution (e.g. docker-compose or BASH script), you can’t get away with mounting the host Nvidia driver and tools via volumes. The software on the container image itself must be built against the specific version you’re running - no exceptions. So, I now rebuild these containers after every Nvidia package upgrade (from the author’s git repo), which is a stupid way to achieve containerization. If Nvidia had a stable API/ABI across releases, this would just work. /rant
My mint install won’t let sound through my sound card. Drivers are there, it knows exactly the brand and model of card and shows it, it even knows when I plug/unplug stuff from it, but 0 sound, ever.
The solution?
Just plug my headphones into my new speakers that have their own DAC, anyway.
I have had an issue for years that I couldn’t pinpoint to a root cause (I’m strongly inclined to think it’s a kernel issue). I bought a CM Storm Quickfire TK keyboard with ABNT2 layout.
The issue is: every time I try to type any key that is not a letter or number one, the computer freezes for a full ten seconds before acknowledge the press and showing the character. Tried a bunch of Linux distros through the years and the issue persists. On Windows it works flawlessly.
Just give up trying to debug the problem, but I still have this hole in my heart where the cause of this issue lives.
Oh god I remember that. Luckily in 2003 my main computer was scraped together from discarded parts at my father’s day job, so it was ethernet only
In 2024 on a laptop I still have wifi problems though. Most recently, if I closed and opened the laptop lid (suspend + resume), the wifi hardware just disappeared off the face of the kernel.
Turns out that the iwlwifi kernel module just irreversibly crashes when the laptop suspends and can only be fixed with a reboot.
So I had the fun task learning about systemd pre-suspend hooks to unload the driver before suspend and load it again on resume.
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