Shit, I’m still waiting for the day macos (I assume that is what we are actually talking about here) is usable.

Ok. What exactly is not working with the network? Are you on wired or wireless? If you do run ip a, does your interfaces show up?

Another thing to look at is journalctl -b. Look for errors, lines in red, anything about the network. If you can roll back to a functioning boot (or run journalctl -b -1 should show the previous boot) and compare to that is probably a good idea, journald (displayed by that command) may contain errors that are not relevant, so comparing to a functioning boot may be good.

Also, depending on how old your computer it, there may be another hdmi output which uses the GPU integrated to your CPU. If that is the case, you could switch to it if the nvidia card stops working just to troubleshoot, take a look at journalctl -b and look for errors again. If the screen just goes black, and does not boot, this may also give you some messages as to why the nvidia graphics is not coming up.

To the menu to the left, there is one item called “secure boot”, and sometimes “fast boot” is there. However, if your computer is booting at all, I’m not sure this is it. But try it, it will not hurt.

GTX 580? Maybe you have to install an older driver, like the 470-series of the driver appears to support it: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/ Ubuntu has a bunch of older series of nvidia driver you can install for this purpose.

That would not explain your networking though. Unless that is also some older hardware too… But, a common thing to do as a new user in linux may be to find posts which answer “how do I install x in ubuntu” and they usually involve editing files under /etc/apt/sources.d/. This can wreck your system in this kind of way, so: have you done that? Or this is pure ubuntu, just regular apt update/upgrade and some apt installs?

Those penguins appear to be Gentoo penguins, so in a way only one belongs

Maybe dropbear and unlock really fast from another device where the monitor is already on?

Works really great if you compile sudo with insults enabled: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/70c1ee4b44f5b15822919c05ffbde857fa879e48/plugins/sudoers/ins_classic.h

Hell yeah, schizo-chad!

Yeah! I forgot about revdep-rebuild! Now that you remind me I do remember being worried about having to rebuild modules, forgetting about it, having to boot frlm live and chroot, and what not going back to Gentoo. I had almsot completely forgotten about it because it is so smooth sailing now.

I started using Gentoo many years ago, and took a break from it for a few years. It has some overhead to maintain. Two years or so ago I went back to it and, no joke, it is so much simpler now. Dist-kernel, dracut, refind just sorted everything. I felt like I was cheating. I don’t have to write my own custom initramfs for my custom needs? Stuff just solves it? And compilation errors and conflicts even when running a bunch of keyworded packages: gone! What is going on?

So important to document all these tactics and counter-tactics. It will also come to parts of Europe soon. Sweden has under the current government implemented prisons for children and forced government employees to report suspected undocumented children and families. And the far-right has not even officially been included in the government yet. We probably have to prepare here too.

Still, huh? Yeah, that is why I stopped using it too.

How does OTR work on it nowadays, or have XMPP moved to some other encryption?

This is such an important thing to learn when using linux. If you want to be able to rescue your setup and not just reinstall: live usb!

To do a rescue on a system that does not boot, then you may also have to enter your environment and fix things, you do that by chroot. I always forget what steps are necessary, so I always look it up in the gentoo handbook: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Installation#Chrooting It is the same principle with any live media.

Look into a distro that you might like, and find a “live usb” of it, often it is the installation media itself. How it works is basically it is a linux already installed on a disk image you transfer to the usb, and tell the computer to boot from it. Instructions on all this usually comes with the live usb media. Then you usually get a “try it out” or “install” option, or it just leaves you at a pre-configured desktop. Click around, install stuff, browse the web, get a feel for it.

Gives you a shell where you basically are sudo for every command.

What do you mean? This

remoteuser@server$ nc -l -p 4444 > /dev/input/event0


localuser@laptop$ cat /dev/input/event0 | nc server 4444

doesn’t work?

I don’t use .desktop files that much… But I guess xfce is X and not wayland. Check the DISPLAY env var for your user and set the same in your script there or run the binary with that env var.

How long since you ran ‘apt update’? I have envountered issues where the local apt cache is stale, causing it to contain packages which are old and removed from the upstream repo. You need to update your cache and try to install again.

Windows XP had been out for quite a while, and I did not want to use it. Staying on 98SE was not going to be possible forever. Ubuntu was quite new, I had recently started uni, and some friends helped me get started. There was one thing that absolutely amazed me: package repository. Just the concept. Windows at the time, to install stuff was finding random pages, sifting through ads, locate download button, hope it is not a virus. Linux had it solved. So far superior it there was no way I’m going back after that.