I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.
I’ve got the usual forgetting the .
in lines like this:
$ rm -rf ./bin
As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.
You know, the war stories.
Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.
Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects
folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.
have an nvidia GPU
have Fedora
download RPM package of drivers for Red Hat (after all, Fedora and Red Hat are… compatible, right?)
Everything goes fine
Six months later, upgrade to a new version of Fedora
oops, kernel panic at boot after the upgrade, and no video to troubleshoot after UEFI boot
figure out how to boot into a recovery partition from UEFI
figure out how to enable a serial console over a USB device
figure out how to connect to the serial console from another computer using another USB device
figure out what the kernel panic is from (not the upgrade, but the driver which wasn’t upgraded)
figure out how to uninstall the incorrectly installed driver
figure out how to install the correct driver
That was a fun three week OS upgrade.
I have a super-n00b question, and I apologize in advance, but, uh…yeah, what is a serial console?
Tl;dr: Stick in a USB cable and the other side gets your console.
You attach a secondary computer via serial (COM port) with your primary computer and then you can open a console on that one. You can access the primary computer as if you would be sitting in front of it.
You probably have to explain what Serial actually is.
I mean serial is just a port that runs in serial. You send something and you receive something afterwards, after you’ve received you can send again…
Not all people know that, to be fair.
True. It’s not quite common nowadays unless you work in administration or are an enthusiast.