I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

  • Avid Amoeba
    6•8 months ago

    Stupid 1

    Made a 4-disk RAID10, back when 160GB disks were boss and I couldn’t afford WD Raptors. Fiddled with some tune2fs options to make it even faster. After a reboot, fsck found some errors. Asked if I want to fix them. I said yes. It asked again for some more errors. I said yes. Eventually I jammed a screwdriver in the keyboard to accept every prompt. After a while of this a grim feeling came over me that fsck might not be doing me a favor. Stopped the machine. Booted into a live CD, mounted the fs, a good number of music and other files were gone. Luckily the corruption wiped mostly larger files like audio and video which were replaceable. I started making backups after that.

    Here’s what 160GB disks sequential read benchmarks used to look like:

    Stupid 2

    Around the same time I tried to convert Debian to Ubuntu by replacing the Debian repos in apt with Ubuntu’s and following with dist-upgrade.

    • @jyte
      2•8 months ago

      I tried to convert Debian to Ubuntu by replacing the Debian repos in apt with Ubuntu’s and following with dist-upgrade

      Shouldn’t it work though ? Or be close to work with the appropriate options passed down to dpkg

      • Avid Amoeba
        1•8 months ago

        Sadly no. It sounds plausible, which is why I tried it. However there can be unreconcilable package dependencies and all apt can give you is a choice between one broken mess or another.

        You might be able to do it if you bypassed apt. Perhaps if you get the list of packages the new OS needs, just download them with apt, then uninstall almost all dpkg packages with purge, then install the new ones.