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?
Not strictly Linux related, but in college I was an IT assistant. One day I was given a stack of drives to run through dariks boot and nuke.
I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think midway through, my laptop shut off.
Guess who picked the wrong drive to wipe with DBAN :)
Just straight up overwriting boot sector and superblock of my hard drive thinking it’s the USB drive.
Udev tried to warn me, saying there’s no permission, and I just typed sudo without thinking.
Then after a second I remembered USB block devices are usually writable by users, but it was too late.
A few years ago I was having obscure audio problems on Ubuntu so I tried replacing pulseaudio with pipewire. I was feeling pretty cocky with using the package manager so I tried
sudo apt install pipewire
Installed successfully, realized nothing changed, figured maybe I had to get rid of pulseaudio to make it stick.
sudo apt remove pulseaudio
Just two commands. Instant black screen, PC reboots into the terminal interface. No GUI. Rebooting again just brings me back to the terminal.
I fixed it eventually, but I’m really not very computer literate despite using Linux, so I was sweating bullets for a minute that I might have bricked it irreversibly or something.
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.
I’ve literally done the rm -rf / thing. I thought I was in a different subdirectory, but I was in / and did rm -rf .
When it didn’t return after half a second, I looked at the command again and hit CTRL+C about 20 times in the span of 3 seconds.
I had to rebuild the install, but luckily didn’t lose anything in /home.
I had issues with a new version of glibc that prevented me from working on music in Ardour on Manjaro. I then proceeded to force-downgrade glibc (in the hopes of letting me get back to work) and that broke sudo and some other things, which I found out after rebooting. That was an interesting learning experience. Now I snapshot before I do stupid stuff. :]
I’m not sure how funny this will be, but here’s how I broke my system twice in a single case. Step by step:
- Migrated from Manjaro KDE to EndeavourOS KDE. Kept the previous home directory.
- After a few updates, there was a problem with Plasma. Applications were not starting from the panels or the .desktop files (they worked from the terminal. The terminal emulator was in startup and worked that way)
- After a few google searches, found out that downgrading glibc would do something, so downgraded… Worked for a while
- While using
pacman -Syu, I always checked for warnings (foolishly thinking that the downgraded and ignored glibc would cause apacmanwarning if it broke dependencies) and there were none. So, the updated OS stopped working due to unmatched glibc. BREAK 1 - To fix it, I opened one of my multiple boots (another EndeavourOS) and made a script using
pacman -Qlandcpto copy new glibc related files into the broken system (because I was too lazy to learn how to do it the correct way withpacmanandchrootdidn’t work becauseglibcis needed by bash). - Turned out the script I made was wrong and I hadn’t checked the intermediate output from
pacman -Ql, which was tellingcpto copy the whole /etc /usr and other directories. (just if I hadn’t given the-rtocp) BREAK 2
In the end, I just made a new installation, this time with a new home and hand-picked whatever settings I wanted from the previous home, Viva la multi-HDD
Deleted my entire efi partition while trying to install some grub themes.
And then my backup didn’t work when I tried to restore it.
I have pretty colours now though, so it was all worth it :)
Many many years ago I wanted to clean up my freshly installed Slackware system by removing old files.
find / -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {};
Bad idea.
Accidentally executed a JPEG (on an NTFS partition) and the shell started going crazy. reboot was not successful =[
Bro and it does not give any format error or anything?
Nope, I guess the processor just skips bad instructions, or most numbers are valid…
CTRL-C-ing apt because it looked stuck for more than 10 minutes. I don’t recommend doing it.
Haven’t used
aptin a while, is it not atomic? What happens if you mess with it?I don’t think it is, if it doesn’t run its course on its own, you’re screwed. It’s Debian so you can recover, but, at least for me, it was painful.
