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.
You attach a secondary computer via serial (COM port) with your primary computer and then you can open a console on that one. You can access the primary computer as if you would be sitting in front of it.
You probably have to explain what Serial actually is.
I mean serial is just a port that runs in serial. You send something and you receive something afterwards, after you’ve received you can send again…
Not all people know that, to be fair.
True. It’s not quite common nowadays unless you work in administration or are an enthusiast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_port
Because there’s going to be kids around here who have never seen this port (other than maybe on a Point Of Sale (POS) system?)
Lol, I appreciate it, but I’m actually old enough to remember those! I know what a serial port is; I just didn’t know what a serial console was or if it was related. Haha.