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?
I overwrote my ssh private key with rsync. Fortunately I had special cron job running on my servers that updates ssh public keys on a server with ssh public keys from my github account, so I just had to upload a new key to the github and wait for a few hours.
One of us. One of us
(it was nvidia related)
lel we got 'im, boys. /s
Migrating a 8 year old server to fresh new hardware. Can’t believe you can basically just rsync one computer to another
You can indeed.
My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.
i for one welcome our grub bootlorders
“AI is gonna take over the world”
Grub: “Hold ma beer”
GRUB
TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit.
Yup, its super easy
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.
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!”
Dammit, my organic memory failed yet again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that prompt (and I have agreed to that as well at least few times).
Yeah OP is not gonna die on that
Nice, you get a sticker!
ctrl + z
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
