13h ago

Welp, I just apt purge'd damn near everything except the kernel. How's your Friday going?

I hear this is a rite of passage. I made it 4 weeks before I rekt all my shit (it was nvidia related). Where do I claim my sticker?

In all seriousness, now that I understand better these commands that I've been haphazardly throwing around, Id like to do a clean install. God knows what else Ive done to it. Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?

36 comments

Ahh, baby steps.
Around fours years ago I was still using Arch and I somehow decided to try LFS on my main machine (bare metal unfortunately). Started compiling coreutils but as I forgot to specify the build directory to gmake, my /usr/bin directory was being emptied to make space for the coreutils compilation process. Bricked my whole installation.
Now I'm smarter than four years ago as I mainly use NixOS.

My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.
- "AI is gonna take over the world"
  Grub: "Hold ma beer"

congrats you're ready for the next step: a declarative package configuration like (non-)guix or nixos

Does anyone sell 'Yes, Do As I Say!' stickers?
You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.
- it's "Yes, do as I say!"
  
  Yeah OP is not gonna die on that

FWIW each new install is faster, especially if you write down the "weird" steps.

I accidentally interrupted a system upgrade, breaking networking and package manager, among other important bits

ctrl + z

TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit permanently.
- Yup, its super easy
  https://itsfoss.com/backup-restore-linux-timeshift/

One of us. One of us

On the bright side, it's never been a better time to switch to an immutable distro...

(it was nvidia related)
lel we got 'im, boys. /s

If anything can be salvaged, I'd suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don't come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I'd recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)

I've done the same thing (Nvidia related) on a machine hooked up to an expensive scientific instrument. Didn't get any other work done that day... Ugh.

Migrating a 8 year old server to fresh new hardware. Can't believe you can basically just rsync one computer to another

I feel your pain 😅🫠
Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.

Congratulations OP!
About a year and a half ago I nuked my root partition with sudo rm -rf /*. Fun times.
- That’s just how you unlock the hidden boss fight.

Welcome to the club, here's your penguin 🐧

Nice, you get a sticker!

Reinstall using btrfs as the root files system and enable automatic snapshots. The data on your home partition will be fine, just make sure the installer doesn't format it.
- I really need to learn how to do that. I installed SuSE something on my laptop and selected that file system but couldn't find how to do the snapshot stuff. I'm sure I'm just dumb, but also exhausted, and mentally drained.
- More technology does not fix daft manoeuvres! You do learn by your mistakes but keep the environment as simple as possible and add complexity later. Just like I didn't back in the day! Mind you we lived in greyscale back then.
  I've been a Linux sysadmin (and I have a lot of customers) for around 25 years now and only during the last 18 months have I bothered with something funky like ZFS - Proxmox is why and that's thanks to Broadcom deciding to fuck up VMware. I have done a lot of migrations and many more to follow. BTRFS is coming along but it is not for me quite yet.
  Backups are golden. Even a simple rsync of /home and /etc to a USB stick or two will do for starters. If you want a challenge then try getting the Veeam agent for Linux working, with secure boot. I suggest not yet (secure boot). However, Veeam do a community edition which is free for 10 workloads (VMs/agents). I recently recovered a HP laptop running Home Assistant to a Thinkpad and everything just worked apart from the network, which is pretty reasonable and it took about 20 minutes.
  So, I suggest that you get your backups in order first and then you can muck about with confidence. If you have some time and energy then do have a go at Gentoo and/or Arch. I ran Gentoo as my daily driver for some years and now I never fear anything IT related.
- Better yet, backup /home to a separate disk and replace after install.

Recently upgraded a laptop that had been on the shelf for 5 years up to latest version. Flawless one-step upgrade! nixos. Things never get in a tangle where installing and uninstalling packages leaves random artifacts behind. If you saved it to version control, you can return to a past system configuration and the only thing different is your home directory data.
And yes, if you have a home partition and root partition, that's exactly what you can do. That's the beauty of that approach. But back it up!

Back the hell up. Seriously. I cannot overstate how peaceful life is when your ass is properly covered.
- This is my favorite song about proper Linux practices: https://youtu.be/WpQrAbkM3dI

What where some of the commands you where unsure of? Might be able to help if it's a common problem like smb sharing.

Try to fix it.

Yes.
I wouldn't do it without tests and "enough" experience.
I would backup first.
Then I would install an atomic distro because I wouldn't want to care about this ever again

The best way to learn something is by hurting you.

I try to keep everything I care about in one folder that is backed up regularly, so it’s not such a big deal to reinstall the OS.

Spent half the day debugging wifi and kernel panic issues during boot. What finally fixed it was adding 5 sec delay to iwd service so wifi card firmware can do it's thing (or at least I think thats why it helped).

36 comments