Can you switch to console? Try ctrl+alt+F2 when the system is booted up and log in to that.

I suppose some package update was interrupted or crashed. You can attempt to re-run what’s missing with ‘sudo apt-get install’ and ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a’. And, assuming your console access works, you can at least check log files on what’s wrong, but for that I don’t think any generic ‘read /var/log/syslog’ file is too helpful as there’s a ton of stuff and with things like journalctl it’s pretty difficult to navigate around if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

And also, more details would be helpful. What you mean by ‘enters a loop’, what it actually says that went wrong and so on.

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).

Does anyone sell ‘Yes, Do As I Say!’ stickers?

You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.

“Giving” as in “US military paid them and Elon took credit for it”.

Elections are suspended because no one has time to “run an election”.

And also (if I’ve understood correctly) it’s straight up impossible by Ukrainian laws to run elections when martial law is active. They’ll hold democratic elections eventually and choose the next president but until then Zelenskyi is sitting president. Things run just like their laws mandate.

In some other country there’s memecoin agency operating without any legal oversight with considerable power, maybe look on to that first…

We’ve all been there. If you do this stuff for a living, you’ve done that way more than once.

You’d think you’d learn from your mistakes

Yes, that what you’d think. And then you’ll sit with a blank terminal once again when you did some trivial mistake yet again.

A friend of mine developed a habit (working on a decent sized ISP 20+ years ago) to set up a scheduled reboot for everything in 30 minutes no matter what you’re going to do. The hardware back then (I think it was mostly cisco) had a ‘running conrfig’ and ‘stored config’ which were two separate instances. Log in, set up scheduled reboot, do whatever you’re planning to do and if you mess up and lock yourself out the system will restore to previous config in a while and then you can avoid the previous mistake. Rinse and repeat.

And, personally, I think that’s the one of the best ways to differentiate actual professionals from ‘move fast and break things’ group. Once you’ve locked yourself out of the system literally half way across the globe too many times you’ll eventually learn to think about the next step and failovers. I’m not that much of a network guy, but I have shot myself in the foot enough that whenever there’s dd, mkfs or something similar on the root shell I automatically pause for a second to confirm the command before hitting enter.

And while you gain experience you also know how to avoid the pitfalls, the more important part (at least for myself) is to think ahead. The constant mindset of thinking about processes, connectivity, what you can actually do if you fuck up and so on becomes a part of your workflow. Accidents will happen, no matter how much experience you have. The really good admins just know that something will go wrong at some point in the process and build stuff to guarantee that when you fuck things up you still have availability to fix it instead of calling someone 6 timezones away in the middle of the night to clean up your mess.

The one thing I always forget, no matter how many DNAT setups or whatever I write with iptables.

True, but more often than not mozilla should have newer packages on their repository than any distribution. And the main problem still is that Ubuntu changed apt and threw snap in to the mix where it doesn’t belong.

But it’s not obvious either. When I say ‘apt install firefox’, specially after adding their repository to sources.list, I’d expect to get a .deb from mozilla. Silently overriding my commands rubs me in a very wrong way.

If only there was some other alternative than throw my old stuff in the bin.

Edit: I missed the ‘un’ on ‘unsupported’. It’s supposed to be a joke.

Ubuntu or something based on it

I would not recommend ubuntu, specially on this case. System updates, snapd mostly, have gone downhill and it’s nearly impossible to avoid reboots for extended periods. Debian seems to be still as solid as it’s always been.

I just use xargs -n1. Or -exec with find.

I don’t bother to take out the screws. I just drill handful of holes trough the whole thing. Or if you’re really paranoid a MAP torch is enough to melt the whole thing (don’t breath the smoke).

Small thing, but I really like it: I have ~/autoclean_tmp directory on most of the hosts I use as a desktop. Then on crontab I have a find-command which automatically deletes files which are 7 days or older. I can throw stuff I download from the internet and copy from other hosts, random text files when setting up new stuff and so on in there and they just vanish after a while.

Jolla had similar concept too at 2013. I had one and back then it was really, really nice phone. Maybe not in a sense that flagship models from big vendors were, but I really enjoyed the UI and modular options was a huge selling point at least for myself. Then they started to work with a tablet which failed on pretty much all fronts and the whole company practically disappeared.

Of course it does. But the others were (legally speaking) just suspicions and the vessels in question weren’t in Finnish waters, so there was only so much our officials could legally do (and one could pretty strongly argue that they should’ve done more).

But on this particular case with a whole cargo ship apparently filled to brim with spying equipment, there’s very little hard facts on the story and the best approach would be to wait until our officials conduct their search and write reports. Then, after official and confirmed facts, we can discuss about it further. Right now spreading news like this doesn’t really cause anything more than even more distruption to global situation which is already a pretty complex mess.

And even the ‘russia links’, on this individual case, are a bit thin line to walk. Assuming russians are behind it (and I would be the least surprised if that was actually proven) they’ve hidden their tracs pretty well, so now it’s only a domestic tool for them: “Look how the Finnish people among others doubt us for everyting even if we’ve done nothing and there’s a paper trail to prove it”. Facts are the hard currency with the information war going on, and this is not it.

And, as I’ve got decent chunk of downvotes on previous comment, I would very much like to see the Russian federation to collapse eventually and for the situation in Ukraine to smooth out, but on their own terms. Should Ukraine fall I’m afraid we’d be the next to defend our borders and I’m too old for that shit. I’ll of course do my part should the need rise, but I’m not looking forward on it. I’ve spoken to enough of our veterans to know that the saying ‘war is war and hell is hell, and the first one is way worse’ is a fact and I don’t want my kids to experience that.

The ship in question MIGHT have had some equipment on board at SOME POINT in time. As of now it’s unclear if the devices are still on board and even if they are on the ship we don’t know if they’re packed in crates or wired to power and antennas. And even if it had, it might have legitimate uses and carrying a load like this is not in itself illegal.

And the source is pretty much ‘some guy told us so’. So, as a fellow Finn, I’m glad that our officers are up to their task and the ship is secured for further investigation, mostly regarding to damaged electric and data lines and I trust that they do a proper search and report accordingly at some point.

But right now this James Bond-stuff is getting far more news articles than it deserves. For that headline alone I can understand why it gets traction, our local news very much included, but there’s very little meat on the story at least for now.

I don’t know if equivalent exists on fediverse, but r/itsaunixsystem is available on $that_other_platform.

With Linux the scale alone makes it pretty difficult to maintain any kind of fork. Handful of individuals just can’t compete with a global effort and it’s pretty well understood that the power Linux has becomes from those globally spread devs working towards a common goal. So, should Linux Foundation cease to exist tomorrow I’d bet that something similar would raise to take it’s place.

For the respect/authority side, I don’t really know. Linux is important enough for governments too, so maybe some entity ran by United nations or something similar could do?