Your Newbie Mistakes

[mike998]

I remember once reading that everyone will make mistakes as they begin to use Linux with the example being that you will have everything installed, and be stuck at a command prompt wondering why xstart doesn't start xwindows until you get a local kid around who looks at your setup for a second, types startx and walks off giggling at you....

I remember doing this once when I started back in '98 and was fiddling with SUSE...

What newbie mistakes have you made?

[KingBahamut]

Lol...When I started out, I inadvertenly caused KP so many times that once....many moons ago, I reinstalled linux 8 times in one day.

Most of this was centered around recompiling the kernel.

Sigh....Frustration at its high.

[Brunellus]

I remember once reading that everyone will make mistakes as they begin to use Linux with the example being that you will have everything installed, and be stuck at a command prompt wondering why xstart doesn't start xwindows until you get a local kid around who looks at your setup for a second, types startx and walks off giggling at you....

I remember doing this once when I started back in '98 and was fiddling with SUSE...

What newbie mistakes have you made?
#rm -rf ~/*

lesson: don't go into irc without reading up on the commandline first.

[Lord Illidan]

I remember doing something like xstart...

[xequence]

I didnt make seperate partitions for /root and /home so It will be harder to upgrade.

[newbie2]

"New users tend to make some common mistakes when trying out GNU/Linux for the first time. The reasons for these mistakes are varied: because GNU/Linux is a different kind of operating system; because Windows fosters bad habits; because users choose the wrong distribution; because Mercury is in retrograde; and myriad other possibilities. Here are some solutions to five commonly encountered GNU/Linux problems : "
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/08/24/1836223

[poofyhairguy]

What newbie mistakes have you made?

I used Mandrake as my first OS, and thought that its many problems were Linux's.

[Brunellus]

I didnt make seperate partitions for /root and /home so It will be harder to upgrade.
yeah I'm guilty of the same.

[Juippisi]

My worst? rm -R /etc/*

I was trying to make a bootdisk and what I ment to write was "rm -R ./etc/*"

What made it so bad then? System was Gentoo :P. I was upgrading kernel and thought that I'd make a bootdisk just for a case.

After my HDD made nice sound for a sec, I realised what I have typed. So I typed "ls /etc" and got nothing. After seeing this, I just laughed, then cried and laughed again.

Day after this, I installed Debian.

These days I'm very careful with rm-command ;).

[mike998]

My worst? rm -R /etc/*

I was trying to make a bootdisk and what I ment to write was "rm -R ./etc/*"

What made it so bad then? System was Gentoo :P. I was upgrading kernel and thought that I'd make a bootdisk just for a case.

After my HDD made nice sound for a sec, I realised what I have typed. So I typed "ls /etc" and got nothing. After seeing this, I just laughed, then cried and laughed again.

Day after this, I installed Debian.

These days I'm very careful with rm-command ;).


Ohhh - This reminds me of another good one....
Playing with FreeBSD, I downloaded the ports.tar.gz file from the ftp server to the /usr directory, un tarred, unzipped it, and then proceeded to remove the .tgz file... I type "rm -rf /usr"... Got distracted, pressed return by accident and nearly started crying when my /usr directory went to Hawaii...
(Yeah, I know now that -rf is bad practice when removing a single file, but that didn't help me then!

[Wolki]

yeah I'm guilty of the same.

Heh, add me. The fun thing is that this wasn't a newbie mistake, since my first linux install had a seperate home. It's more the hybris of "Noone is going to use that install for advanced stuff, so just leave the defaults" until my main hdd broke and i was too lazy to reinstall ^^;;;

[daveisadork]

I've made plenty of mistakes, most of them from just not knowing how things were supposed to work. The first Linux experience I can remember was being stuck in RPM hell on Mandrake. I wanted to install some piece of software, but the RPM had some dependancy that I couldn't find the correct version of or conflicted with something else, etc, etc... I'm sure you've all been there.

Looking back, the biggest mistake I made when initially coming over to Linux was expecting it to be Windows, but better. It didn't take long to learn that it was very, very different and better for it.

[skoal]

Prior to XFree86 3.x and just before monitor EDID technology was released from Area 51, I fiddled with "modelines" and "dot clock" algorithms, trying to set display/refresh sizes comparable to Windows...

Well, I spent the next few months staring at a 15" screen resembling an hourglass...

\\//_

[KingBahamut]

I think we should rename this thread to something like



Here is what you shouldnt do in Linux

[Ampersand]

I set up my first linux box without a swap partition, didn't seem to cause too many problems though. I also took a while to work out that you had to use ./ to run scripts &c. I seem to remember having fun with the 4 or 5 levels of dependancies I needed to compile gaim.

[rjwood]

my first of many many mistakes was even befor I installed: I read an article on Ubuntu and got a free iso burning sofware package and used azzuras for the first time. I burned the iso image and checked the md5 sum, it didn't match. So I burnt another and another(-well you get the picture) untill I had 25 copies in the trash and had ordered my free copies from ubuntu. Then a friend of my sons advised me to try to reboot with one of them in the cdrom. Well needless to say that I had a copy for everyone who made the mistake of walking into my house for a while. So, 3day's and alot of lost sleep but , I'm glad I kept with it because I am having more fun now on my computer then I have ever had before.