Around 2017 I spent three days on and off trying to diagnose why my laptop running elementary OS had no wifi support. I reinstalled the wifi drivers and everything countless times. It worked for many days initially then just didn’t one day when I got on the laptop. Turns out I had accidentally flipped the wifi toggle switch while it was in my bag. I forgot the laptop had one. Womp womp.
I had a friend come over to my place to fix her laptops wifi. After about an hour searching for any setting in windows that i could have missed, i coincidentally found a forum where one pointed out this could be due to a hardware wifi switch…
Jumping from the default kernel with zfs to the xanmod kernel using a manually compiled version of zfs. I don’t rememeber a whole lot but it was quite… interesting. Next would be a suddenly vanished efi partition and my f* mainboard refusing to boot ZBM.
Bonus: my currently still unfixed problem is a very weird freezing/stuttering of the whole OS and the only (useless) “lead” I have is workqueue: fill_page_cache_func hogged CPU for >10000us 4 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND
I don’t know how I fixed it, but KDE Plasma 5.whatever on MX was acting up. It would let me login but if I couldn’t do much else. Wouldn’t respond to my clicks or anything. Thankfully I could open Yakuake and install a different desktop environment. Then, one day while I was backing up files to do a reinstall, it started working again. I could use Plasma without issues. I have no clue what fixed it, though.
It also came with a non-issue of now my laptop won’t auto turn on every time I open it up, but I’ll take that over having to reinstall and set things back up.
Xfree86 was sonetimes a mess. And i did not have a browser anymore when it refused to start. So man pages only.
I once rm -rf all the db files of a running database: Recovered the files via inodes since they were all still open on the running database, that was a mess.
I run a distro with OpenRC instead of systemd, so I had to gain some understanding of udev permissions for USB devices and come up with my own udev rules for Steam because I couldn’t follow Valve’s setup guide.
VR pretty much just worked for me with my vive. Had some issues with weird stuttering and tearing but I managed to find a solution in some config file.
So I mostly fried the SSD by using it to write and rewrite ML checkpoints and logs, this in turn made the device read only and I somehow managed to migrate to a different SSD probably using clonezilla or something, but it messed up the bootloader so I installed refind in a new partition, configured it and voila it works. It’s scary because you need to do everything without seeing your system even half alive anywhere along the process, but it’s not actually hard, just copying data and installing/configuring a bootloader. But for a then 20year old at his more or less first job my head was on fire for the 1.5 days this took.
By far the most difficult single thing that I’ve ever had to fix that actually had to do with the system.
I now don’t flood my SSDs with data that is constantly rewritten.
I screwed up permissions on an LXC container in Proxmox by converting it from unprivileged to privileged (against recommendations) and had to mount it offline and write a script with find into chown via the execute flag to change all the UIDs and GIDs from the shifted unprivileged ones to the standard host-level ones.
Luckily this was in my own lab so it was a (mostly) harmless learning experience.
Accidentally put grub on the wrong partition on the device, which it was not happy with. Was able to copy some files over, manually boot the OS, and reconfigure grub to be in the right partition, took me about 2 hours? Then I did it again on a different machine, and speedran it lol
I recently managed to recover from a corrupted libstdc .so. Turns out I shouldn’t have bothered because the it was a Pi and, of course, the SD card had shit the bed, but I was pretty happy with myself for like 30 minutes.
while playing around with face/fingerprint unlock for my laptop, I messed up pam (Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules) and no passwords were working anymore except for the root account. At first I was still on my account, but then I stupidly rebooted and could only log in as root. After so many config edits, I gave up and instead booted up windows (my laptop’s dual booted), setting up a new linux install in VirtualBox, and then copying over the PAM config files from the vm to the actual Linux install.
and it all somehow worked!
I am now facing another issue which I’m gonna say here in the hope somebody has already ran into it: after updating to KDE plasma 6, tap to click works on my touchpad, but actually, physically, pressing on the trackpad doesn’t work. I can hear the pad’s physical clicking noise, but nothing happens os wise
Nice I recently borked PAM on my headless fedora server host while attempting to set ssh to require 2fa using Google Authenticator. I still haven’t gotten that process figured out - I follow the instructions but each time it won’t accept any 2fa otps from my Google authenticator app
I had problems with the session manager My lightdm was broken and I tried to fix it. Disable, enable, start, stop the service in systemctl I have changed the configuration of lightdm I’ve tried different lightdm greeters But the problem wasn’t with lightdm, it was xorg. I don’t use xorg, and now I use terminal session manager “ly” It will work even without xorg
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