Tinkering is all fun and games, until it's 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you're about to execute... And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: "damn, what did I expect to happen?".
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don't remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it's units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors... So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it's contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect... So, I installed glibc from Debian's repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn't have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most "funny" fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.
The monitor didn't die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.
Back then I was testing modelines to see the maximum I could push to my 14" monitor. I then backed it with a 1200x1600 virtual screen.
My girlfriend got sick from watching me scrolling around and bought me a 19" display which could do that resolution - and ended up frustrated when I added a larger virtual screen.
A 19" monitor was quite big for the day, and expensive! I hope your gf didn't beat you up too much for that :)
I know little about crt because I was born in 2000. Can you explain why did the monitor started to make scary sounds?
I know that crt monitors didn't have any method to report the supported frequency, aside from more recent models, correct?
Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.
The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it's spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.
The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.
A good starting point for a wikipedia rabbit hole covering the software aspects on how to drive a display: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline