Amateurs. I can search for fixes while my computer is still broken!
(ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F2, etc to switch to TTY, then
lynx ddg.ggto get to DuckDuckGo)This is true for any OS. If it’s not working you can’t use it to look up how to fix it. That’s not unique to Linux.
Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.
As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.
To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren’t counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol
I’ll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren’t actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn’t know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
Also,
Back when all I had was one computer with Linux and I got in trouble I had a bootable USB stick so I could load up a browser and search forums for a solution.
As someone that has run Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1998, I can confirm this as 100% accurate.
I unironically keep a tiny linux mint boot usb key on my keychain.
When I feel bad about myself, I remember that I have that on my keychain, and I think I can’t be that much of a failure because that’s pretty cool.
Hey, I’m impressed
A usb stick with a live linux iso is generally enough
Or an OS that can rollback easily (ie: Silverblue and friends, NixOS…) Unless you’ve mangled your bootloader. Then the USB drive comes in handy 😄
My setup got messed up once after a kernel update that went bad and booting from the live USB and running the recovery install fixed everything for me
Only problem was that I had lost the USB, but luckily I still had my Win10 partition I can’t boot into and make a new one.
So it seems the lesson here is you don’t need another computer as long as you keep another partition with a backup OS on a different drive?
I remember printing the gentoo handbook back in 2005 to have something to troubleshoot my install process.
Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.
Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.
I learned about the “nofail” option the hard way when setting up a headless server and typing the address of my NAS wrong.
This is me but with 20 days! I still had my usb from installing Linux (Mint btw) so I was able to just re stab my f.
I just manually mount my HDD now lmao. I’d say don’t laugh but I still do.
That’s what makes Linux so much fun.
If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I’d have 4 nickels. "<.<
I’ve been there. I’m 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:
"Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit “Enter”
And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.
Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.
Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.
This when my little dual-booting laptop would suddenly start in GRUB Rescue Mode because a forced Microsoft update hijacked the bootloader again. X_X
REISUB
Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
If I had a nickel for everytime I had to borrow a laptop to write to a USB, I’d have a nickel.
your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn’t working or ssh’ing into my machine when the video output doesn’t work
Meant in that sense, yes - searching for errors and their solutions as I see my computer having such major failures
That’s what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can’t switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It’s rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I’m sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.
Forgive my dumb ass for asking an easily googleable question;
What is tty?
TTY is short for Teletypewriter. Basically it is the terminal that you see if you don’t boot into a graphical environment. You can access the TTY from anywhere by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-7 (will throw you into tty 1,2,…7, depending on which F key you pressed) You can switch between TTYs either by pressing CTRL+ALT+,F? again, where the F-key determins on which TTY you will land, or by using CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to go back and forth one at a time.
The TTY is a terminal so you can do stuff like run commands here. If your graphical environment is broken, you will probably end up here and can often fix the problem.
Oooh! I see, thank you!
Yesterday, I tried booting into Wayland on Linux Mint, and I got NOTHING.
I rebooted and got nothing again. I tried the Ctrl+alt+F(x) key combo, but that didn’t work either. From your explanation, it sounds like I should’ve been able to at least get a terminal for that, but it didn’t seem to work. Could that be because graphically, it WAS displaying something after all?
Ended up unplugging the screens from the GPU and tried plugging it straight into the mobo instead, and it ended up working after all.
Hmm… What does nothing mean exactly? Did your monitor turn on during boot? If so, did it turn off again at some point or did it display a completely black image?
Since the mobo connection worked (which usually uses the integrated GPU chip on your CPU as far as I know), maybe it was an issue with your gpu? Or the connector or something?
I once had a broken setup where got stuck on a black screen, unable to switch to a tty. If I started spamming CTRL+ALT+Fsomething right after Grub was done, I managed to escape the black screen before it appeared, maybe you could try spamming the key combo early on and see if that opens a tty for you. If that is the case then you can be pretty certain that the problem is related to your desktop environment.
Alright, I’ve managed to open the TTY when trying to boot into Mint(wayland). You were right! It’s probably an issue with my nvidia drivers. I’ll see what I can do. Thanks
Nice! Since your installation is showing similar symptoms to my installation when I updated my nvidia drivers a while ago, I’m just gonna tell you how I fixed my issue on my computer, and maybe it’s gonna work for you too. If you want, you can try this:
Boot your PC. After your Motherboard is done showing its logo or whatever it shows, you should see grub. If you press ‘e’ before grub proceeds to boot into linux, you will be thrown into a simple editor that will let you temporarily change what grub boots. There is a line with the kernel image and arguments, it probably starts with ‘linux’. Go to the end of the line (line might span multiple rows, so end of line might be on the next row) and add this:
nvidia_drm.fbdev=0
Then press F10 to boot. That’s it.
This fixed the issue for me. If it will fix the issue for you as well, you can consider adding it to your kernel parameters permanently or making sure the nvidia kernel module gets the parameter by other means.
Hope this helps!
**I appreciate the help immensely. ** First thing I needed to do was figure out how to get grub to show, and to do that, I changed a file in /etc/default/grub to have the menu style be “menu” instead of “hidden”.
Second I tried adding the nvidia_drm.fbdev=0, but it would boot directly into the default version of Mint (x11). I then had to disable auto-login in the lightdm.conf found in /etc/lightdm/
After that, I finally booted into Wayland again after adding the temporary parameters and… I get a black screen again, sadly. At least the TTY works so I can get out, no problem.
I did a bunch more tinkering that I found online, but after a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing, I went back to x11, only to realize that the driver manager was well and truly messed up. Could not get it to start at all. Ended up feeling pretty happy I took a snapshot of the system before I started all this, cause I could just rollback everything and now it works like before. (Still no wayland though, but whatever :P )
Interesting. I’ll see if I can figure something out.
Answering your question, it booted to a black screen. The screen was “on”, it wasn’t complaining about not recognising a signal or anything, so SOMETHING must’ve transmitted. I’ll try spamming some keys to see if I get a reaction. Thanks for the tip
Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It’s been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.
I am a teacher by trade, so I absolutely love helping others. I’ll absolutely pass it forward! This is also how you build a healthy community, I think :D
Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
Changing graphics card configs in linux or editing fstab, probably
Had my server set up with encrypted drives and getting the root key from a flash drive. Cloned a drive and replaced the old one, somehow it was crypttab that just stopped working with me. Took like 4 hours solid to get it actually back up.
Lol I just had an fstab issue today where my computer wouldn’t boot
Exercising my skills 😎 pls help
Dist-upgrading across 2+ years of upgrades.
It’s been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved…
Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
Anecdotic evidence is anecdotic.
Correct. But usually it’s spelled anecdotal.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
I’m used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn’t move, the clock wasn’t updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it’s also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn’t addressing them.
Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
I was dual booting, distro hopping to figure out what I liked & didn’t like. After a few installs, I got cocky and thought I had the hang of things, and instead somehow deleted the bootloader, or something like that. Couldn’t boot up at all to any OS.
Removing /dev/sda1 alongside Windows partition I was dual booting
Forgetting to put the correct keys for secure boot.
I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it’s not too hard to restore but still.
My NAS is one place where I wouldn’t risk anything that isn’t rock solid. Even if you don’t lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.
You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.
Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody’s installing MacOS anyway.
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC… then someone replied “wait wouldn’t just running the ‘install VLC’ command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?”
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
deleting all the dependencies of VLC
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.
That’s partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I’ve had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don’t even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it’s called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn’t booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don’t get me started on the keyrings when you don’t update for a while.
Phew, so I’m not alone? 😂
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won’t work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn’t run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn’t run on many laptops – I don’t know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn’t work, and it couldn’t sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can’t remember). It did work though!
even today my lenovo doesn’t sleep >_>
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
Commonly referred to as a “smartphone”
Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
Did your bootloader ever fail you? Now how do you debug that?
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.
I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn’t ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It’s not 2003 anymore.
You’re certainly doing Linux! I’ve only had one bad break, but i had a backup (if you mess with f-stab, save a copy it before you do anything)
I guess I take that back, there was 1 time that I did mess up fstab and had to boot live and fix it. But that wasn’t too bad.
