(All) Serious Failures?

Last year I successfully broke a Linux Mint install by sudo apt-get remove ing python. It sucked, but on the flip side I got to improve my terminal foo by learning how to mount a flash drive in terminal and copy directories over to it. Was fun and didn't lose any of my important data. Also, I later read someone posit that if you successfully break a Linux install, congrats, you're an official Linux user, so I have that going for me.

Protip for Linux using readers: don't sudo apt-get remove python ... unless you want to become an official Linux user, which in that case, I highly recommend!

first time i tried to format a drive to re-install win 2000 when i was 17... messed up first partition and didn't even make a second attempt... i had already lost all my napster mp3 downloads in the first place... rage broke a brand new CRT... rage.

Nice, but why would you try to get python removed?

I actually forgot about the part where, by deleting half of the application, while i was trying to get it to start at boot... i actually had to go into recovery mode, in order to delete the offending file, that just kept restarting itself... i was tired when i wrote the post and what you said reminded me... :)

So yeah, welcome to the club.

Backups are important, your napsters could have been saved.

i can definetely see where that would be a bad thing. the cinnamon interface is written in python...so thats important. theres probably a load of system processes that rely on python and those are important. curious how you managed to get to removing it. at least you were able to recover. personally my linux install on my laptop (which is mint) is disposable and nothing of significance is kept on it so that if i screw it up (and i will) i can just reinstall, run updates, and be on my way

Back in the day, I put my corsair dominator GT ram in upside down and burnt a pin as well as burnt the ram slot on the motherboard.

That's really quite sad actually....

That's really not fair, OpenWRT installs should have some ability to recover from accidents like that, since it's more common than most people think.

I was just in a situation like that a month or two ago, i know that feeling of "oh holy crap"

Why did you shut down?  Was it on accident?

I remember working on my Raspberry Pi B about 6 months back where I somehow glitched out Rapbian as I was in the process of changing the password for PI... so needless to say it corrupted my password hash and made it impossible to login.

I was able to fix it by modifying the boot script to, instead of starting the processes in init it would actually just send me into the bin folder (I think it was the bin folder) and I could fix the system while running in runlevel 0.... which from a theoretical standpoint, at runlevel 0 I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT WITHOUT BEING QUESTIONED BY THE INFIDELS; so yeah, it was cool.

I was gonna format an sd card I had to ext3 to boot android on my windows phone, for that I had to either pay for some windows software or use linux, so i setup a live cd of ubuntu, start gparted, and selected "format ext3". After about 3 minutes of waiting i thought, this is taking a really long time... so I cancelled, gave up and rebooted the computer, except it didn't reboot into windows, I got a message that said "No OS was found, please install an operating system" (or something like that).

I had formated the HDD and not the SD card... I was quite angry with myself for the rest of that week...

Always check your "drives" mate.

Was taking a programming class on Python 3. Decided eh fuck it, I'll remove Python 2.7x and install Python 3. It was unnecessary and I didn't get to the second part of the plan.

can't you just install side by side?

I run 2.7 and 3.0 on my box

Of course you can. Unfortunately I didn't know that at the time :D

Oh haha, yeah, they should really put that as a listed feature on the site