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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What's (are) the funniest/stupidest way(s) you've broken your linux setup? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago by fl42v@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

252 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] mlg@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

fstab bind mount for /home that I misspelled, so I couldn't login as myself.

fstab external hdd mount that didn't have ignore flag so PC would pop if I booted while unplugged

Accidentally booting windows after a year and it overwrite my EFI boot entry.

The best I've see however was an acquaintance who accidentally set perms to own user on /usr/bin

So everything went from root:root to user:user which removed all the SUID/SGID bits as well so a bunch of bins broke lol.

Believe it or not, it was actually fairly easy to fix with chmod and chown

[–] YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I have an embedded device that runs as root and has busy box. I accidentally ran chmod -x on one of the busy box sym links (strings I think) and it made all of the core utils un-executable. Unfortunately chmod is a core util. Every bash command was throwing wild errors and outputing gobbledygook. You really start to sweat when ls and cat stop working.

I had full disk image of the device and started deducing the issue. Luckily I could still execute non core utils and ssh/scp was working so I wrote a little program to restore permissions, uploaded/ran the binary, and learned nothing from the experience.

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

Had the issue with the ignore flag missing literally a week ago. I mounted the HDD to troubleshoot it, ended up kicking the bucket, couldn't read any partitions from it anymore, but I had the Partuuid in fstab. Had to plug the main drive of the system into another one to fix fstab....