palordrolap

Wow. You were lucky. That abort might have been what saved you there.

It sets permissions (ch ange modification rights) on all files (-R = recursive, stepping down through directories) in the file system (hence starting at /) so that they can be read, (re)written and executed as programs by all users (the 777 part). 000 would be no permissions for anyone (except for the root user), which would be just as bad.

If you’re looking for someone else famous who might actually be worth celebrating today, try Mel Brooks, born this day in 1926.

Obligatory DO NOT RUN THIS ON YOUR COMPUTER (or anyone else’s).

You’d think with fully open permissions, everything would work better, but many programs, including important low level things, interpret it as a sign of system damage and will refuse to operate instead.

If you do run it, you’d better have a backup or something like Timeshift to bail you out, and even if you do have that, it’s not worth trying it just to see what will happen.

It’s not quite as bad as deleting everything because you can boot from external media and back up non-system files after the fact, but the system will almost certainly not work properly and need to be repaired.

You have been warned.

when

can

Almost. You did well, but it’s too hard for me, except maybe for short phrases like this, which, regardless, still requires effort well above my comfort. It’s the sixth most used letter by some measures. Seek out the typesetters’ placeholder phrase where the first “word” has it as last (sixth), place, before the successor “SHRDLU”, which show the order of the most used letters of, uh, latter-day British? Oof. Edit: Modified to avoid a superfluous usage.

This hurts, so it’s time for me to stop.

“N-words” plural? I can imagine edgy students going out of their way to avoid all words starting with that letter as a result of that rule, just to be difficult.

The sign itself lacks words starting with that letter other than the rule which bans it, and the separate quoting of one word that has one in it somewhere suggests they’re allowed as long as they’re unspecified on the list (otherwise that entry would have been omitted), so it’s entirely possible to misinterpret.

On the other hand, avoiding all words starting with that letter seems like a fun idea, but will people even be able to tell? And it’s surprisingly hard to express some concepts without it.

As far as I know. But if you really want to p*ss people off, deliberately self-censor when you do.

From the ground up has been done at least once, but given there are multiple layers of interface and driver, it might not be at the right level for whatever hardware you have.

I’m thinking specifically of how pipewire recently came along and basically took over the functions previously provided by pulseaudio, to the point of pretending to be Pulse where necessary so that things don’t break.

FWIW, I recently learned that my motherboard has features that weren’t unlocked by default in my distro. Not related to sound, mind you, but nonetheless, I’ve gained access to that now. It required loading an extra kernel module. The same might be required to get the best out of your sound card.

Once you get out of a monoculture, you start to better appreciate that ‘best’ is a subjective term.

Some distros are better for some users (and purposes) and others for others.

But it’s got to be Mint ;p

There’s no way Windows would just access non-readable partition

I knew that was true back in the day, but I haven’t tried dual booting in a long, long time. Also, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft’s current incarnation to “accidentally” decide that that “empty” partition would be great for virtual memory and the hibernation image.

If you’re lucky, it’s still on the disk and you just need to “repair” the bootloader.

If not, well, that traumatised Mr Incredible pastiche might be at least a circle of hell too pleasant.

You have backups, right?

reset is your friend. Less so these days with GUIs where it’s often quicker to close the window and open a new terminal emulator, but still good to know about in a pinch. That rare occasion where you’re actually on a console and Ctrl-Alt-F# isn’t available, or attached to a remote session where disconnection might mean you can’t get back on, etc.

The man page suggests Control-JresetControl-J as the correct sequence to run it, because the Enter key might have had its behaviour altered. And if things are still slightly weird after the reset, run its parent tset.

In before this hotline is closed down or subverted.

This is probably down to decimal versus binary unit prefixes. As far as I’m aware, RAM is almost always still power of two kibi-, mebi- or gibibytes, unlike more permanent storage, and it often gets the kilo-, mega- and giga- prefixes regardless.

In other words, if you mix up thousands and 1024s you can get 64×1024×1024×1000 (whoops) which is roughly 67 billion.

Sounds like a “pester the devs” kind of deal if it’s an open-source project. It’d be a matter of them calling isatty(3) and a few extra if statements.

As for Perl, s/\e\[[0-9;]*[a-z]//gi would be my first attempt to get rid of them. You’ve probably been through all this already though.

Technical waffle:

The aforementioned regex/substitution would also delete malformed things like \e[;;;q, but since the offending supplier of codes is probably only generating valid codes, that shouldn’t matter much. There are also rarer escape sequences that it doesn’t catch, which would be where those better third party tools come in.

Come to think of it, there’d be a regex that detects everything laid out in the control_codes(4) man page (and, importantly, nothing that isn’t). It would be one of those terrifying write-only things like the one that validates the full e-mail address standard, but that only proves that such things are possible.

I’m almost tempted to have a go at creating it. Almost. Maybe another day.

Curious as to what those programs were. Most well-behaved programs can detect they’re outputting to a pipe, for example, and will drop the terminal escape codes. That is, pushing the output through something like cat ought to have caused those codes to not be generated in the first place.

Those same programs often have an option to generate the codes regardless, but that shouldn’t be the default.

An example here being the versions of ls that have the --color=auto option, which behaves the pipe-detecting way, and --color=force to send the escapes anyway. Of course, giving no --color option at all also avoids the escape codes, but many distros automatically set users up with an alias for ls that contains it, and the auto sub-option is precisely so users (and distro makers) can have ls act nicely.

Of course, the thing you were having trouble with might not have been a well-behaved program, which is why I’m curious.

The existing computer can serve as the “second” if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven’t borked the hardware).

Yes, it’s a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it’s all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.

In related news: When did you last make a backup?

Reminds me of the story of a company whose internet connection would cut out intermittently and they couldn’t figure out why. Details hazy but the gist is here.

One day they have a tech come in to investigate the problem. He goes downstairs to where the router is, and everything’s fine.

Seemingly the moment he goes to leave, the connection goes off. Panic stations! He goes back to the router and the connection is re-establishing. OK. All tests fine. He goes away again. It goes off again. What. Tech aura is real!

Nope. Turns out that when he went downstairs, he used the stairs. When he was coming back up he was lazy and used the lift.

The lift motor had been causing enough EM noise to knock out the connection whenever it was used.

“Sgrandhomme” was jarring enough to get me to go look up the etymology of Stallman, and it’s apparently nothing to do with men and more to do with the mouth (myn) of a stream (stæl).

Unfortunately, «(De l’)embouchure du ruisseau» is a bit long for a surname, French or otherwise. I could see abbreviated variants of that mistakenly turning into “Rousseau”, “Lambert” and “Dubois”, if not others, but “Ruisseau” itself could work. There’s apparently a book called “Monsieur Ruisseau”, but I get the impression that it’s not a common surname in French (a bit like how “Stream” isn’t in English), and also, it completely ignores the -man part of the name.

Going another direction gives “Crique”, but in modern French that means “cove” which isn’t quite the right meaning, and also doesn’t seem to be a surname.

Yet another direction takes “Stallman” to mean “shopkeeper”, and from that we might get “Marchand” or a variant, which is definitely a French surname.

There are dozens of us. Dozens!