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?
Yeah but, you’re a towel.
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?
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.
It was all just bloat anyways, who needs anything besides a kernel?
It’s a pure Linux system now! No GNU!
You can also install Alpine.
My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.
Mr Torvald, I don’t feel so well.
i for one welcome our grub bootlorders
GRUB
GRUB
“AI is gonna take over the world”
Grub: “Hold ma beer”
the truest form of Linux, without all the GNU bloat, well done! :)
I’d like to interject here…
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.
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.
One of us. One of us
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.
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.
D’hoe…
(it was nvidia related)
lel we got 'im, boys. /s
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.
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 installwhich will choose the most current and best drivers for your GPU and install them… If you want to install a specific version thensudo 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-driversto install your gfx drivers;sudo apt purge nvidia-driver-535 #or whatever your installed version is sudo apt autoremoveYou 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.
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
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
If you are trying a new install go for something with timeshift or Silver Blue, OpenSUSE snapshotting. You can trash the whole setup, then reboot to the previous state. A catastrophic failure becomes a 1 minute fix.
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.
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
Lol Nvidia has quiet the reputation in the Linux world. Keep at it though. We all make mistakes.
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.
