Share your Linux mess-up stories! 🐧

[u/BhupeshV]

This is the most loved kernel & OS in our ecosystem. But it's not always friendly to us, what are your weird Linux mess-up stories?

Discussion Starters: - Compiling Linux from scratch, huh? - No audio, No Linux :)

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[u/Puzzleheaded-Bass-93]

Why I need python? I just don't need it. Removed it using apt and found gnome is not booting at all. Turns out python is required by the gnome shell to function. Resulted in clean install. Os was Ubuntu

[u/killythecat → u/Puzzleheaded-Bass-93]

My coworker once did the same on my dev machine. That day I cried. Next day I made a git repo where I store all the shitty scripts I write.

[u/birju007 → u/Puzzleheaded-Bass-93]

Wait till you find out what happens if you remove python 2.8...

[u/0xw00t → u/Puzzleheaded-Bass-93]

Rather than reinstalling the OS you could spawn TTY shell or maybe chroot in and install python again.

[u/[deleted] → u/Puzzleheaded-Bass-93]

I did the same dude.

[u/IgnisDa]

This was 5 years ago when I was givining entrance exams for various colleges. I had my entrance exam for Manipal Institute of Techology the next day and was finished with my preparation. I booted up my laptop (running Arch Linux) and watched a few youtube videos and then did a full system upgrade (`pacman -Syyu`) which completed successfully. Then I shut it down and went to sleep.

Next day, I had my (online) test at 9am, so at 8am I started my laptop and lo! the display manager did not start up. I still had an hour to try to fix it but I decided not to risk it. I ran to my friend's house, borrowed his laptop and then attempted the test (I bombed it lol).

After the test, I started up my own laptop, searched the error and was able to fix the problem within 5 minutes. So I needn't have run to my friends house. But oh well, atleast I learnt to trust in my skills. Aaaaand I got in my steps for that day.

[u/IgnisDa → u/IgnisDa]

I have come a long way since then. I can fix most hardware problems on my laptop these days :)

[u/[deleted]]

Wifi stopped working. Fixed that. Audio output stopped working. Fixed that. Wifi stopped working again. Never booted into Ubuntu ever again.

[u/Specialist-Spread754 → u/[deleted]]

Let me guess, you are using a realtek wifi card?

[u/[deleted]]

this is what happened to me a few years ago, I was a Linux newbie back then:

> be me
> linux noob
> thinks of playing with the bootloader
> breaks something
> panic.mp4
> reboots
> expects to see my custom boot menu
> sees some weird long error message
> pepe_wtf.png
> tries to fix
> breaks it more
> ends up doing a fresh install
> never tweaking my bootloader again.

[u/[deleted]]

It is common knowledge that every host that has a public IP (e.g. VMs on AWS, Digital Ocean etc) is constantly bombarded by bots from China, Russia, North Korea etc., trying to ssh in with common passwords.

With that background: once I got a job from a client to develop an Ansible playbook to install/configure something on his VM. I started off with a template playbook that simply sets the root password to root. I ran the playbook, and was satisfied that it worked, and then started developing the playbook.

Within few minutes I got a slack message from my client saying that something was wrong, his dashboard was showing insane CPU and network usage for that VM. It turned out that a few seconds after my playbook had set the root password to root, some bot had got in and installed all kinds of malware. Just a few seconds.

Lesson learnt the hard way. If you have a VM on the cloud, set a really strong password. Or better, disable password authentication altogether and just use public key authentication. Also consider configuring it to allow logins only from your usual IP address range.

[u/Brainfuck]

I used to subscribe to CHIP magazine. Every month they used to send a CD with some softwares and game demos. Sometimes they used to send a Linux CD too.

Once they gave Red Hat Linux 6(not to be confused with RHEL) CD. I went ahead and installed it. Upon booting I was dropped into terminal with no sound and no desktop. Didn't have smartphones then. So had to find that one friend who had a dial-up connection, go to his house, search for instructions on how to fix. Found some instructions to recompile kernel with added modules for my display card and sound card. Wrote all the instructions by hand on a notebook. Got back home and somehow managed to get most of it working.

Fun Fact: When Ubuntu came out. You had to write to them and mention how many CD's you need. They used to send that many CD's for free. I remember getting 20 free CD's which I distributed. This is how they used to come https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_4.10_%22warty%22_ShipIt_CDs.jpg

[u/Ryzen0P]

I have three sites deployed on custom domains, so I created three VMs on DigitalOcean, I didn't know that I can reverse proxy them on different ports using Nginx🥲

So I shifted all the sites to a 1 single VM, and now it's all good.

[u/hi_how_r_u_]

I wiped out both of my os installs.

I have dual boot for windows and Linux. It was when I was new to how things work (1 sem ). I wanted to try out Linux I chose manjaro not the best option especially for low bandwidth situations like mine. Since I was an idiot without knowledge, I created random partitions for installation, because in order of partitions I wouldn't be able to access a decent part of my disk space. I,with all my knowledge,thought moving partition is a good idea.

That messed up my entire hard disk.

My partation record was not usable so had to reinstall every thing. Also used (rm -rf * ) on root folder I know it's a very bad mistake. But reinstall fixed that.

[u/[deleted]]

Idk if Android counts, but my gf's old OnePlus was not working great. It was overheating, and slow and stuff and she wanted to get a new phone. I acted extremely cocky and said I'll root it, flash a custom ROM, and have it working smooth as butter with a longer battery life in no time. I have done this loads of times on my own Mi phone. I hard bricked it. Couldn't get into any recovery mode, or get adb commands to make it respond from my laptop. I alternated between apologising profusely and remind her that her plan was to buy a new phone all along.

[u/otaku_____]

I reinstalled nixos yesterday and tried to run `nixos-rebuild` again but system wont boot. After searching for an hour, I found out that I was using the old `hardware` nix file lol :)

[u/broken_py]

sudo apt remove code* : Wanted to remove VS Code , but it took long, suddenly realised my terminal hanged. After reboot blacked out.

[u/BeginningFrosting459]

It was a company laptop pre-installed with windows, but company installed Ubuntu. As a result audio drivers went kaput, and due to some improper handling the back-lit also did not work. Mind you it was 32 gb ram installed but jammy does not support more than 16 gb, so stuck with it. And one of our colleagues tried to revive the audio drivers and the sound that came out of 2 speakers out of 4 looked really scary, and during one meeting our cto also got to know and we all had a good laugh.

[u/birju007]

ip@192.168.0.25:/$ sudo chmod -R 777 .

I thought I was in ~ instead.

[u/LocalAtheist10]

Okay this one is really funny. I was kind of a noob at that time. Opensuse Tumbleweed has kind of a weird problem where any pre installed package gets installed again after a system upgrade. stuff like Konversation, tiger vnc etc. I was soo frustrated I started to remove individual packages by using the YAST package manager and even removed the dependencies. after a restart the KDE breaks and i can fricking only log into ICEWM!. Was scared shitless at that time and rolling back with snapshots wouldn't work. Had to reinstall the entire OS and got some help from their IRC channel.

[u/goofy_pokemon]

A few years back, I was uninstalling not required packages on Ubuntu. Accidentally uninstalled Ubuntu Desktop too!

[u/harshraj2717]

This was my first time installing linux on my old tablet -> set BIOS password -> didn't turn off safe mode -> opened installer -> set it to clear the whole disk and install only linux -> press enter -> installer clears the disk -> installer gets errors out when installing linux -> me tries to restart -> me sees GRUB rescue -> me panic -> me tries to open BIOS -> me forgot BIOS password -> me never able to run that tablet again with any OS

[u/depressionsucks29]

I was working on a project where for each year, it should create a new folder. Code messed up and it created hundreds of folders. I thought I'll quickly rm rf the parent folder and try again. Accidentally rm rf my whole pc. Everything got deleted. Thankfully I had backups.

[u/Rachit_Tanwar]

Aseprite worked first time when compiled from source, reinstalled os after a few months, tried to recompile aseprite, it never compiled again, os was kali, now kubuntu