Why I Love Linux

[JJ Neff]

I must admit I got a little teary reading this!

:-)

Thanks for the tale of woe and recovery!

JJN
--- Robert Romito <robromito at adelphia.net> wrote:
> A couple of nights ago I was playing with my Linux From Scratch (LFS) 
> build.  I'm building a boot disk for installing LFS on other systems. 
> With the boot disk's root file system incubating deep within my /home 
> directory, my work commenced.  While residing in  
> /home/<blahblahblah>/installdisk I discovered BusyBox 
> <http://www.busybox.net> (http://www.busybox.net); a nifty utility which 
> allowed me to purge the boot disk's lib directory.  Excited about 
> finally fitting the kernel and root fs on one disk, I began to type. As 
> root, from the  /home/<blahblahblah>/installdisk, I typed rm -rf /lib/*. 
>  Oops... I meant to type rm -rf lib/*.  Unfortunately, I didn't hit 
> control-c fast enough.  The /lib casualties were immense.  Everything 
> stopped working.  Couldn't ls, cd, su, or cp.  Couldn't even shutdown 
> with ctrl+alt+del; I had to power off.
>   
> Following a colorful commentary on the preceeding action and resultant 
> situation, I found peace.  This is Linux, not Windows! I don't need to 
> re-install and sacrifice all my tweaks and mods.   Armed with my trusty 
> Slackware 8.0 install CD, I started system CPR.  From the install CD, I 
> mounted the root partition, copied the glibc package to the root 
> partition, installed the package, unmounted the root partition, removed 
> the CD and rebooted.  My system's pulse strengthened.  I repeated the 
> process twice, re-installing the glibc++ and e2fs packages.  Upon the 
> final reboot, login welcomed me with open arms and a login prompt.  X 
> loaded succesfully, NVidia logo and all.  My applications ran with the 
> same vigor as before my surprise attack.  Then a lone, white dove soared 
> across my screen...
> 
> ... Ok, maybe a dove didn't fly across my screen.  But my system came up 
> beautifully, as though I had never wiped out the core libraries that 99% 
> of the system relies on.  Just imagine if I did this to 
> c:\winnt\system32.  The moral is that it's OK to suffer from 
> Windows-panic-itis when you make a mistake as root.  Just make sure you 
> take a deep breath and remember you're in Linux land now.  For that 
> which cripples Windows only stings Linux.  Just ensure a boot disk and 
> the original install media is always close at hand.
> 
> Robert Romito.
> 


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