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?

  • @Nibodhika
    18•11 months ago

    I’ve done my plenty of stupid stuff, from dd disks I was using to forcefully uninstall dependencies of the package manager. But the one that takes the cake for me happened back in 2012, I was working at a research lab in the university and was sharing a computer with another intern. That other intern used Gentoo and so we agreed that the machine should be Gentoo, I’ve installed it at my house on my PC and got comfortable with it before we shared that computer. One thing that I learnt when installing Gentoo is that the /dev folder is created on boot, you don’t populate it when installing, instead you mount the one from the host system you’re using to install.

    The computer had an issue with a device, can’t even remember what it was, so I thought I’ll run rm -rf /dev that should take care of the issue and after a reboot it will be repopulated… It might have worked, but what I actually ran was rm -rf /etc.