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?
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.
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.
Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?
Yes, but you might have to muck around with
/etc/fstab. The reason is because when you install to your root partition, the installer will create a new /home in that root partition. (Unless you have an installer that’s smart enough that you can tell it otherwise.)You should be able to mount the partition in any case, but to have the system recognize it as /home it has to be properly set up in fstab.
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Yeah but, you’re a towel.
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.
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.
D’hoe…
Nice day to move to nixos ;)
OP mentioned having used Linux for 4 weeks. If they are interested in learning more about Linux, I feel like even Arch would be a better next step.
I love NixOS and have been using it for over a year at this point but sometimes when things don’t work I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. I’ve been using Linux for ~7 years now.
See my top-level comment; even if they’re ready for the complexity, it doesn’t protect you from a similar mistake!
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.
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.
You might want to look into Snapper: https://documentation.suse.com/smart/systems-management/html/snapper-basic-concepts/index.html
Booting from snapshots has pulled my chestnuts out of the fire a few times–between using a rolling release distro as my daily driver, and NVIDIA graphics not always behaving well in conjunction with that.
I will do that, thanks for the recommendation! I definitely need to get that knowledge/workflow down before I make my main driver a Linux machine.
Better yet, backup /home to a separate disk and replace after install.
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.
The best way to learn something is by hurting you.
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!
Try to fix it.
Yes.
I wouldn’t do it without tests and “enough” experience.
I would backup first.
Then I would install an atomic distro because I wouldn’t want to care about this ever again
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.
