Juozas's Dump

My firefox installation on Ubuntu got updated to 124

Mozilla is ready to release Mozilla Firefox 124, so Mozilla ppa for Ubuntu already has it already built even before the release date even though currently it is in the beta state. Because of that  Firefox version 124 got installed even if officially latest release is only Firefox 123 and no Release notes for 124 is ready yet.

Rage quitting upon trying Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS after trying to compile nvidia driver while using 3.x kernel backported from the later release. More described in post "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /"

Finally got an old linux version running on my pc, with fully working nvidia driver, though only bootable by using old boot loader installed on usb drive. As described in my earlier post, only default (2.6.x) kernels would work with the driver version, where the backported (3.0.x) would fail. Also had to run nvidia-xconfig as root to complete the setup, before it was unaccelerated display with little resolutions available. The screenshot shows a minimal xfce4 desktop running with the default theme.

rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Trying to install an old Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS version and make it usable along currently running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS would fail as it would lead to dependency hell and other problems when trying to install video drivers. Just by installing base system, default kernel (2.6.x) and networking components the system would not boot unless booted from external usb with old bootloader installed on it. Also if target partition was formatted from modern system the bootloader would not install to any drive nor create its config files. It would still not work as the screen would not show anyhing unless the backported kernel (3.0.x) were installed from the repositories. It would require proprietary nvidia driver on graphical interface as open source driver would not work with my monitor as I found eariler. And after installing a newer kernel version that would work with current bootloader (from a deb file other than what is available on repositories) the nvidia driver installation would still fail as no kernel headers would be found at the time. Trying to install kernel header deb files would not work unless dpkg was updated to a version newer than available on the repositories. After upgrading dpkg and installing kernel headers the kernel modules would fail to build as it would not work with current c compiler, trying upgrade it would require manually downloading and installing required debs, and it might lead to dependency hell not mentioning some debs that would not be available to download ending with a system w/o working graphics. As I was trying to find such packages I ended by running the rm -rf --no-preserve-root /  just out of frustration since I was unable to find them online :\ Also later I found that even backported 3.0.x nvidia kernel modules still wouldn't build as such kernel might be incompatible and/or driver would be broken. Conclusion: don't try to install a newer kernel from packages not coming in repositories and then try to install graphics drivers as it might lead to many problems in the future. Also don't use backported kernel as it would not be compatible with provided nvidia driver. Use virtual machine instead if needed.

Reinstalled server os

Today i've reinstalled the os of the server that runs my minetest server and related pages. It will take some time to setup everything and to restore what's needed. It has been running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS up until now and the new os is Debian 11.

Edit: Got the web server working. Sadly no running minetest server yet.

Edit2: Minetest server is finally back up and running, old worlds restored.

Find manually installed packages that has other packages depending on it on Debian based systems

Running command below generates a list of packages that can be marked as automatically installed, as long as apt-rdepends package were already installed. It generates a script that can be used to mark all found packages as manually installed.

echo \#\!/bin/bash > mark-auto.sh; apt-mark showmanual|xargs -I{} sh -c '[ "{}" = "$(apt-rdepends -r --state-follow=Installed --state-show=Installed {} 2>/dev/null)" ] || echo apt-mark auto {}' >> mark-auto.sh

It can be modified to mark packages automatically if preferred instead of writing to a script

apt-mark showmanual|xargs -I{} sh -c '[ "{}" = "$(apt-rdepends -r --state-follow=Installed --state-show=Installed {} 2>/dev/null)" ] || apt-mark auto {}'

Before running apt-get autoremove run it with pretend mode (-s), e.g

apt-get -s autoremove --purge

Mark any package not desired to be removed with

apt-mark manual <package>

from https://loforo.com/asset/0105/8858_682a.png