My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault

—————

tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:

Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.

Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.

The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!

The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.

The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.

It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.

It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.

It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.

If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.

It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.

If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.

On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.

The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!

If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.

Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).

I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.

I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.

All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/

I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.

But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.

(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)

Gotta love Linux!

Wanted to install Arch on my Rasperry PI yesterday, but don't have a cardreader on my PC. Still had an SD with a different distro (RasPlex) lying around. Popped that in, connected power and ethernet only, looked up the default SSH credentials and got to a blinking terminal on my desktop PC.
Well, how am I gonna format my microSD? Rasplex comes without fdisk, and I booted it from the only microSD slot.
Well, here we go - Extracted arch to a usb thumb drive, chrooted into it, switched microSD cards, partitioned and formatted it from the USB-Arch, installed Arch on it, chrooted from Arch to Arch (😁), set up drivers, network and ssh access, rebooted to my why-the-hell-not distro.

Everything worked!

using fdisk be like...

fdisk, cfdisk, diskpart and other tools CAN SUCK MY DICK.

I needed to restore my raspberry pi microsd from 200ish MB back to 16 GB and could find NO WAY of restoring it from my pc. maybe there is some ajbd -asdkasd -adkahdh IUYGFG_&38726283746 sdkfjksjf command that does that but I don't give a shit.

I plugged it into my camera instead. One second and my microsd was restored.

Canon doesn't care about your fancy partitions and other shit, it's just fucking blasting, it is like IN YO FACE. I love it.

Hi!
I was trying to format my backup drive (/dev/sdb)
Was focused on eating also at the same time
Wrote sudo fdisk /dev/sda and didn't notice and changed the partition type to GPT(although it was already like that)
I gave me message that will do on next reboot
My dumb mind didn't suspect, instead rebooted (facepalm)
Lost all my data
Instead of trying to recover was quick to install OS
Permanently lost my data
Help me I need hopes and tricks to move on

How did you cope up with yourself once you lost all your data?

A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.

We tried, in order:

Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...

Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.

Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.

Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.

CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.

All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?

Recent VM/Emulation Adventures:

The goal was to get TCP/IP and SSH running on whatever weird VM/emulated machine, and connect to the chatroom at chat.tcp.direct successfully.

Longhorn, somewhere late pre-reset: Crashes right after installer begins "Starting Windows", 0x7b from sum-match ISO. Fail.

TempleOS (well, Shrine, but y'know): Dear god. No. No, I am not writing SSH in HolyC myself *fuck that,* fail.

Slackware: oh ffs i gotta use fdisk to partition this damn thing? and it's not even the good fdisk? Oh, wait... it hangs. Fail.

WinME: shockingly, was *fairly* stable... until it hung up WASAPI and the hypervisor two frames into desktop rendering. Fail.

Mac OS 7: First-boot after install, immediate unknown trap. Just works, eh? Fail.

Amiga: After about 85 resets and 7 hours of constant fighting with WinUAE, I finally got TCP/IP working. (Required 10MB of total RAM and an FPU to connect.) Success!

Win98FE: just... PuTTY and done. Easy. (This was the warmup.) Success...

Other people's achievements so far:

- Minecraft using the new QEMU interface mod thing.
- Hacked smart fridge.
- iPhone, from custom initramfs.

some recent discoveries of mine:

- DOS FDISK has totally-undocumented CLI (partitioning with auto-format and OTF drive mapping... like one OEM used it for their machine recovery discs and no one else even knows it exists) docs coming soon (this is a lie i found this a year or two ago but forgot till yesterday)

- nuitka is a fucking blessing and the man who made it deserves so much love for it

- my existence is one massive waste of time

- apparently some B450 boards require you to hit a button and test your fans' min/max values and it takes like an hour and IT STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM VISIBLE FROM THE OS ASROCK YOU FUCKS

- the new Ryzen took my latest project's compile time from 30 hrs to like 6 because I can compile 12 things at once instead of just 4

- installing debian sucks ass now, they forgot to push part of apt to the 10.3 stable installer so you just can't install shit through apt until you fix that, though dpkg works

- apparently they pushed a grub-efi-amd64 version that breaks all efivars??? i know debian sid is like meant to be unstable but a bug like that should never have even been rolled into a package till it was fixed like ???????????

- depression sucks ass

I try to delete a partition from my sundisk Pendrive using GParted but when I do this I got the error that is shown in the image.

And If I try to use "fdisk" which run `sudo fdisk /dev/sda` following command it gives me ```welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.34).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.

fdisk: cannot open /dev/sda: Read-only file system```

following error does that mean my pendrive permanently broke can anybody help me!