Linux noob, lesson learned | Hacker News Reader

Linux noob, lesson learned

ericio.blogspot.com

6 pointstephra7 comments

The triple blink reminds me of back when I used ATI's proprietary video card driver, compiled from source. Every time I would upgrade the Linux kernel and reboot, X* wouldn't start (it would try three times and fail, kicking me back to a TTY login).

I think the reason is because closed-source code can only link to the Linux kernel dynamically in order to be compatible with the GPL license, so the kernel updates would break the linking.

*I use X as a nebulous reference to anything related to Linux graphics as I still haven't taken the time to see how all the pieces fit together.

From another Linux noob--what went wrong? What is the correct way out of that situation?

Well, when this happens you could do ctrl-shift-f2 and get into a shell and see if you could work out what is missing. But for me the easiest way was to boot into a live usb, this way you are able to access the file system where your installation is and the just transfer the files.

I did get a error message when I edited the kernel boot (press e in GRUB) and was able to see which file did cause the first hiccup. But it could be dozens of files corrupted.

The files was: /usr/lib64/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 and the error message was that it was to short.

After knowing that and with a internet connection (I run on a 3g dongle, couldn't get it connect via terminal) I could reinstall the pixbuf packages and hope that that was the only file corrupted (not likely from what I got).

As for a correct way, I don't know. One thing in windows that is good (and I don't know if there is this functionality in linux) is that you can just restore the system to a earlier state. The one thing I think linux is lacking, if it doesn't exist.

Sometimes there's nothing you can do. Most of the time you can try the magic SysRq key combos to sync/unmount and reboot. Wikipedia has a nice article on it.

Happens to the best of us. Don't let it discourage you.

What filesystem are you running?

ext4 if I'm not mistaken

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