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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the resurrected laptop to watch youtube videos and listen to podcasts, which was just a fun novelty to do on such an outdated machine.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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15 comments

  • 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.

    Debian tells us that you should never add repositories to a Debian distro. It's the first rule on the Don't Break Debian page. "don't make a franken-debian" https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

    Third party repositories could have malware or be compiled incorrectly for your system.

    Also 1200 package updates means that probably every package on your OS was replaced. Your computer reenacted the Ship of Theseus. There's probably no AntiX left in your system.

    • I'm currently in the process of formatting and re-installing AntiX with the Live USB I still had. I guess I should've taken the opportunity to upgrade to AntiX-23 while I was at it, but I can do that later.

      Like I said though, the official repos didn't seem to have the most up-to-date versions of the media players I use

  • 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.

    Lol, a lesson we have all learned the hard way. It's probably salvageable but if you're not going to lose anything important wiping and reinstalling will be way easier.

  • Mixing a bunch of packages from incompatible repos just produces conflicts, and it's not just because apt is complaining, programs actually have constraints about library versions they need to work and so on.

    You can try to set your apt sources to one and only one repo that actually works (probably a newer one like Debian unstable is better, downgrading isn't really supported), then remove all the packages except the base system, and then upgrade and hope that works. Then start installing stuff again.

    But if this does not work you're going to need to reinstall, so just reinstalling is maybe easier. I would recommend trying to fix it though, for the challenge.

    You'll need to do this from the virtual console w/o graphics (that's not part of the base system), and you probably want a wired network connection. I hear you can use an android phone over usb for that somehow, in case you don't have anything else.

    • There are cases where trying to repair a broken Linux system can be a good learning experience (i.e. it stopped booting because a kernel driver is missing, you somehow managed to uninstall util-linux, you messed up some important config files in /etc, you managed to install a version of libc which is not ABI compatible with the rest of the system), but I imagine this install is so cooked that it would be more practical and educational to just do Linux From Scratch instead. :)

      It is good to learn how to fix things when they break, but learning to fix a problem created by several arbitrary steps which cannot even be replicated is not the most useful knowledge in the world. And then there is always the lingering possibility that something minor is still screwed up causing problems which nobody else in the world will ever run into, which you cannot find any documentation for in a web search.

  • 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

  • If it's been a few years you might as well start over. Maybe just regular Debian?

  • If you hit "Ctrl-Alt-F1" after you get to the graphical login, does it drop you into a non-GUI terminal (virtual terminal) where you can log in? Does logging in work there?

  • Happens to the best of us

  • I just wanted the latest version of VLC

    Use Flatpak or set up an Arch distrobox.

    • I am pretty sure most flatpaks aren't built for i386 but some probably are. Same for the OCI images distrobox uses.

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