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megabat ,

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

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

A recent one:

/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.

ConstantPain ,

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.

rob_t_firefly ,
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

If the keyboard has the same problem in multiple distros, surely the problem lives in the keyboard? Maybe you had a bad one.

ConstantPain ,

Why does it work in Windows though?

rob_t_firefly ,
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe there’s some glitch going on that Windows can ignore or self-correct for but Linux can’t. Such things are not unheard of in hardware.

areyouevenreal ,

It’s been a long time but generally network issues and reinstalling bootloaders or kernels. Fairly easy if you can chroot.

Treczoks ,

My first Linux machine crashing. This was way before Redhat, Ubuntu, Arch, or OpenSUSE. This was installed from 60+ floppy disks on a 386-40 with 8MB of RAM.

This machine ran happily, but it crashed under heavy load. I checked out causing the load by using different applications, but could not nail it to a certain software. So the next thing I checked was the RAM. Memtest86 ran for a day without any problems. But the crashes still came. So I got the infrared camera from the lab to see if some hardware overheats. Nope, this went nowhere, either.

Then I tested the harddisk. Read test of the whole HD went without problems. I copied the data on a backup medium and did a write and read test by dd’ing /dev/zero over the whole disk, and then dd’ing the disk to /dev/null. Nothing did show up.

I reinstalled the Linux, and it crashed again. But this time, I noticed that something was odd with the harddisk. I added a second swap partition, disabled the first, and the machine ran without problems. Strange…

So I wrote a small program that tested the part of the disk occupied by the old swap space: Write data, read data, and log everything with timestamps. And there was the culprit: There was an area on the HD where I could write any data, but when I read blocks from that area, a) It took a very long time for the read, b) the blocks I read were containing all zero, regardless of what I had written, and worst of all c) there was no error indication whatsoever from the controller or drive. Down at the kernel level, the zeroed blocks were happily served by the HD with an “OK”. And the faulty area was right in the middle of the original swap partition.

TPTheWiper ,

lol nerd

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Blocked

TPTheWiper ,

Yes a compliment

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

If you were trolling, “Blocked” would definitely be a complement.

Hadriscus ,

Are you saying this as a compliment ? it’s not completely clear. Either way, it is a compliment

Overlock ,
@Overlock@sopuli.xyz avatar

Nice read! Did you delete the old swap space or left it as-is?

Treczoks ,

I took no risks and binned the disk. I wanted to buy a bigger one, anyway.

Agility0971 ,
@Agility0971@lemmy.world avatar

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

dejected_warp_core ,

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

Suavevillain ,
@Suavevillain@lemmy.world avatar

Fixing Grub issues when I was first starting out.

Magnetar ,

I once broke my Ubuntu install by trying to convert it KDE Neon, that reinstalled half my packages and left it in an basically unusable state. I then un-broke the install while upgrading multiple Ubuntu releases, that reinstalled the other half as well. It actually worked, and I’m still using that install.

PrimalHero ,
@PrimalHero@kbin.social avatar

Tried to the same thing but didn't have the patience to fix it so I made a fresh installation of kde neon

lengau ,

Hehehe roughly same. I have a KDE Neon install that’s older than KDE Neon. It was originally Kubuntu 13.10 and I’ve done in-place upgrades since.

gamermanh ,
@gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

Still no idea why the card doesn’t work right

lil ,
@lil@lemy.lol avatar

I had to fix so many booting problems using live usb, grub, xorg, login managers, they’are all difficult

SanndyTheManndy ,

I installed nixos on my laptop. That was four weeks ago. I am still configuring it.

azvasKvklenko ,

I was trying to setup Timeshift for system snapshots on a work computer with Ubuntu. It didn’t work for some reason so I tried to first get rid of it. After uninstalling it, I wanted to remove, what I though, were remains of TS files in /run/timeshift, but the root partition was still mounted, so I rm-rfd the whole root, luckily except for home. And the computer has BIOS password with secure boot, so talking to IT dep about what I’ve done that is…. Or is it? The /boot and the initramfs was still in place, so it was dropping me to emergency shell when trying to boot. Connecting external USB to see if I can mount it, hmm doesn’t show up. Quick search on my private computer what kernel modules are required for USB storage, modprobed couple of xhci_* and bang, was able to mount it. I saved result of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid on the drive and moved to my private PC, where I created VM and installed exact same Ubuntu with exact config (LVM+Luks) and after it was done I copied all of / content to the (now formatted as ext4) external drive using cp -a, then edited fstab and crypttab to put proper UUIDs there, set up hostname and user account accordingly. Then moved back to the borked laptop, copied the newly installed Ubuntu back to the root partition, rebooted and it worked perfectly on first try and continues to work. All of that roller coster in just a single hour.

Commiunism ,

It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:

Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.

To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.

RegalPotoo ,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t remember the details anymore, but for a year or two I had a bad run of absolutely hosing my boot config and leaving myself in a state where the system either couldn’t find it’s kernel or couldn’t find the root partition and would drop me into an initramfs emergency shell. I got pretty good at booting into a live environment, getting all my dm-raid and lvm disks discovered, mounting all the relevant file systems in the right place, chrooting in and rebuilding the pieces that were broken

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