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I bricked my Linux install

So, a few years back I installed AntiX-21 onto a 20+ year old onto an old WinXP laptop both as a fun project and to get some practice with Linux. It worked fine, and I mostly used the resurrected laptop to watch youtube videos and listen to podcasts, which was just a fun novelty to do on such an outdated machine. Obviously I couldn't do Youtube in a browser, but I could take URLs and watch videos with VLC in 360p.

At one point VLC video playback stopped working entirely and I could only do audio, I assume because of changes to Youtube. I tried using the AntiX Updater, but even after updates playback wasn't working. Looking at the version numbers of the updated versions of SMPlayer, VLC, etc I noticed they were still not the latest versions available.

I went to the repo manager and added a bunch of repos until I saw more up to date versions of VLC and other programs in the package manager, then used AntiX Updater again and said yes to the over 1,200 updates.

Things didn't go smoothly. The updates were constantly interrupted by errors but I kept restarting the update process until I had to log off for the night. When I logged back in the following day, the desktop I had been using was missing and I could no longer connect to the Internet because ConnMan was broken. I managed to connect to my Wifi with CENI and kept trying to get the rest of the updates done. I just couldn't get ConnMan to update no matter what so I rebooted the laptop again. This time the bootup process was filled with error messages and I could no longer log in at all. I'd enter my username and password and it'd just loop back to the login screen.

I'm pretty sure my AntiX install is bricked now. I assume I should try wiping the Linux partition and reinstall?

I just wanted the latest version of VLC cri

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  • MPV > VLC

    But without any error messages or some such info theres little I can do to help you.

    I went to the repo manager and added a bunch of repos until I saw more up to date versions of VLC and other programs in the package manager, then used AntiX Updater again and said yes to the over 1,200 updates.

    What are these repos? Sounds like you probably installed a bunch of conflicting packages or different versions of packages from different repos.

    I'm not familiar with antix but it appears they have a rescue CD you should probably start there. Also try their forums

    • There's nothing mission critical in there so I'm mostly fine with reinstalling.

      I just wanted to update VLC and my other media players so Youtube would work again. The AntiX repos only had outdated versions, which could be due to the fact that AntiX-21 was followed by AntiX-23 last year. Maybe it's no longer kept up to date? I tried grabbing the newest versions direct from their websites/githubs first but it's not as simple as grabbing an .exe and clicking it on Linux so I gave up and just went ham on the repos, assuming they wouldn't let me brick my computer.

      Lesson learned, I suppose

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