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?

  • limelight79@lemm.ee
    2·
    6 days ago

    I’m not clear what you’ve done here, but I’ve never played with the purge command. I take it you removed a lot of basic packages. How did it happen? Wildcards?

    • 🅃🅾🅆🅴🄻🅸🄴@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      I can’t entirely recall the precise details now, but I was trying to uninstall Nvidia and Mesa packages to fix some driver issues. Some mesa-related packages were remaining, and I couldn’t figure out why, so I manually typed their names in and purged them, then proceeded to watch python, the desktop environment — everything — all uninstall haha.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    7 days ago

    Couple days ago I accidentally removed a package, not fully understanding what would happen. Ended up logging out thinking nothing of it. Couldn’t log back in as there were zero sessions available. Also, for some reason a huge on-screen keyboard kept popping up a lot when I’d click on the login panels things.

    I am very grateful my distro came with Timeshift by default and that I had a backup from the day before to fix everything. Also glad Rescuezilla allowed me to install Timeshift and restore.

    Doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe, it’s definitely a rite of passage to break your system once. That is something I’ll always agree with.

  • verdigris@lemmy.ml
    2·
    7 days ago

    Last week I accidentally overwrote my configuration.nix file with garbage. If you use NixOS this should fill you with horror. If you don’t, that file contains a description of your entire system – all the packages as well as many settings tweaks to anything from GUI apps to core kernel & systemd options.

    I have now learned my lesson and started using git to track my changes. Tbh, I was naively expecting to be able to roll back to a previous config and pull out my configuration file, but that’s not how it works. Happily I had already split out the most difficult to reproduce sections into their own files (mostly networking stuff), so it wasn’t that catastrophic, but it still turned a few minutes of tinkering into a couple hours of forehead-smacking.

  • MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    10·
    7 days ago

    My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 days ago

    If you don’t mess with the partitions during the install and don’t format, and make the same username, you should be back to normal after a reinstall. Take a backup offline, of course.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
      3·
      7 days ago

      make sure not to reformat though. it can be a problem depending on the installer his distro uses.

      i think its safer to just save the home folder, and replace it later when the system is installed.

    • No1@aussie.zone
      1·
      6 days ago

      Ubuntu Additional Drivers offered me a choice between 11 different nvidia drivers.

      nouveau,and then a mishmash of nvidia versions, open, proprietary and server.

      Like OP was probably trying to do, had to manually remove the existing driver before you could select anything. All those options were greyed out because of a ‘manual installed driver’

      And guess what did this ‘manual installed driver’? Me? No. Ubuntu’s own uograde or running the command for ubuntu to select the ‘besr driver’.

      Fortunately, I’d been through nvidia hell several times, and knew how to manually perform the removal and install, but felt horrified for any new users that might stumble into this. With changing versions, it can be difficult when searching to work out which results are actually relevant, and which are obsolete.

      Always remember anything with a wildcard is your enemy. Triple check before you can trust it and hit enter.

      • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        You’re making it to be ridiculous when you just don’t understand the process…which is making it seem like it’s far more complicated that it actually is.

        You literally generally run a single command, like sudo ubuntu-drivers install which will choose the most current and best drivers for your GPU and install them… If you want to install a specific version then sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:535. That’s it. If you’re on an Ubuntu version you should not be manually installing drivers via APT as there are literally applications whose sole purpose is to properly install gfx drivers…

        nouveau drivers come with Ubuntu.

        What you’ll have to do is purge the currently installed manual drivers and then use ubuntu-drivers to install your gfx drivers;

        sudo apt purge nvidia-driver-535 #or whatever your installed version is
sudo apt autoremove
        • No1@aussie.zone
          1·
          5 days ago

          You misunderstood what I wrote.

          I didn’t manually install anything.

          On my machine, Ubuntu upgrade/install AND sudo ubuntu-drivers install BOTH flag the drivers Ubuntu installed as manually installed.

          When you go to the Additional Drivers, it says you have manually installed drivers and all options are greyed out.

          Why do I want another driver? I found the open driver Ubuntu chose to install was flaky and provided substandard performance compared to the proprietary driver.

          And I have my commands to remove drivers, and for reference, the commands you give won’t help a noob, and your steps are incomplete for earlier Ubuntu versions.

          • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            I didn’t manually install anything.

            Like I said, you’re misrepresenting what’s happened here…

            You said specifically that you had to remove the existing driver, and those drivers don’t come pre-installed, nor do they get automatically installed. So you had to have installed them yourself for you to have to remove them to install the right driver. lol

            • No1@aussie.zone
              1·
              5 days ago

              Reread my comment.

              “On my machine, Ubuntu upgrade/install AND sudo ubuntu-drivers install BOTH flag the drivers Ubuntu installed as manually installed.”

              That’s why I have to manually remove them to choose a better nvidia driver.

              I can’t say it any clearer

  • the_q@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    Lol Nvidia has quiet the reputation in the Linux world. Keep at it though. We all make mistakes.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    8 days ago

    TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit permanently.

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
    1·
    8 days ago

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

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • Ænima@lemm.ee
      0·
      7 days ago

      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.