02-17-2024, 12:48 PM
Okay, so here's the situation so far:
17 attempts to install an operating system, over seven different distros, have all, for one reason or another, either failed to install, failed to boot after install, or failed to meet the standards I need to work. The telltale "nothing works, and I'm getting error messages I have never seen in my 30+ years of computer repair" are here in force, meaning that I'm in a negative Mars, a Saturn or a Uranus transit cycle. I haven't had a chance to look yet, but hopefully it's a Mars cycle, since they only last 1-2 weeks. That is the hallmark of these negative transit cycles: nothing works, no matter what I do, and reality bends itself in pretzels to break and prevent what should work (and does work for everyone else). Thankfully they are rare; unfortunately, I have to deal with at least one every 7-10 years.
So I'm currently in the process of attempting a restore from backup. If the cycle were not in play, recovering from the issue I had would have been a 20 minute ordeal. If it is still in play, then some weird crap will happen to make sure I cannot achieve my goals. I got this far a few days ago, only to have the backup restore such that I could not get permissions to return to what they need to be after restoring, and this made it impossible for me to use the files. (And yes, I tried all the recursive change owner/group stuff on the CLI. This just resulted in an error I had never seen before, which stopped me dead in my tracks, because there was no solving it. That was while I was trying to use Linux Mint.)
So... currently restoring from backup. The restore of the whole /home partition takes about 8-ish hours. When it's done I'm pretty sure I have thwarted the whole "can't change owner/group from root to user" issue by switching back to the distro I was using. But this distro had been upgraded on a rolling release for 4 years, and I had been using special features of the installer that the installer no longer has for some reason. Attempting to manually implement them failed also, of course, and so did attempting to manually repair that failure after installing. So I'm going to have to use a hack that is going to be a huge PITA, but it will get the job done. It's likely to take 2-3 more days before I can get everything tested as actually working, and then set up right, since IF the restore from backup works, I have to immediately erase it to do the hack. Doing the hack will probably be 10-12 hours, and then I'll have to re-restore from backup again. What fun.
But come hell or high water I will get this done, we will get back to work, and I will be publishing something ASAP.
17 attempts to install an operating system, over seven different distros, have all, for one reason or another, either failed to install, failed to boot after install, or failed to meet the standards I need to work. The telltale "nothing works, and I'm getting error messages I have never seen in my 30+ years of computer repair" are here in force, meaning that I'm in a negative Mars, a Saturn or a Uranus transit cycle. I haven't had a chance to look yet, but hopefully it's a Mars cycle, since they only last 1-2 weeks. That is the hallmark of these negative transit cycles: nothing works, no matter what I do, and reality bends itself in pretzels to break and prevent what should work (and does work for everyone else). Thankfully they are rare; unfortunately, I have to deal with at least one every 7-10 years.
So I'm currently in the process of attempting a restore from backup. If the cycle were not in play, recovering from the issue I had would have been a 20 minute ordeal. If it is still in play, then some weird crap will happen to make sure I cannot achieve my goals. I got this far a few days ago, only to have the backup restore such that I could not get permissions to return to what they need to be after restoring, and this made it impossible for me to use the files. (And yes, I tried all the recursive change owner/group stuff on the CLI. This just resulted in an error I had never seen before, which stopped me dead in my tracks, because there was no solving it. That was while I was trying to use Linux Mint.)
So... currently restoring from backup. The restore of the whole /home partition takes about 8-ish hours. When it's done I'm pretty sure I have thwarted the whole "can't change owner/group from root to user" issue by switching back to the distro I was using. But this distro had been upgraded on a rolling release for 4 years, and I had been using special features of the installer that the installer no longer has for some reason. Attempting to manually implement them failed also, of course, and so did attempting to manually repair that failure after installing. So I'm going to have to use a hack that is going to be a huge PITA, but it will get the job done. It's likely to take 2-3 more days before I can get everything tested as actually working, and then set up right, since IF the restore from backup works, I have to immediately erase it to do the hack. Doing the hack will probably be 10-12 hours, and then I'll have to re-restore from backup again. What fun.
But come hell or high water I will get this done, we will get back to work, and I will be publishing something ASAP.
Subliminal Audio Specialist & Administrator
The scientist has a question to find an answer for. The pseudo-scientist has an answer to find a question for. ~ "Failure is the path of least persistence." - Chinese Fortune Cookie ~ Logic left. Emotion right. But thinking, straight ahead. ~ Sperate supra omnia in valorem. (The value of trust is above all else.) ~ Meowsomeness!
The scientist has a question to find an answer for. The pseudo-scientist has an answer to find a question for. ~ "Failure is the path of least persistence." - Chinese Fortune Cookie ~ Logic left. Emotion right. But thinking, straight ahead. ~ Sperate supra omnia in valorem. (The value of trust is above all else.) ~ Meowsomeness!
