Intentionally break Linux installation to practice repairing?

[MatazaNZ]

Hi all, wasn't sure exactly where I should post this, it could fall under a few categories, so mods please move if necessary.

 

I'm in a very inquisitive mood, and I would like to know various ways I could simulate various PC issues related to operating systems (Up to and including practically completely broken OS) so I could learn to use various bootable tools to try to fix it. The tool I'm mostly using right now is Hiren's BCD, and my ideology with this is to just throw myself into trying to fix things, and I'll learn to figure it out and how to repair certain issues. My problem though, is I don't know where to start with breaking a system to try to repair. I'm using my old laptop, and just installing Linux (Ubuntu 16.04) on it, and maybe eventually Windows, but not sure yet. If anyone could help and let me know what I could to to simulate issues to fix (including very broken), that would be greatly appreciated.

 

Also sorry for how I explained this, I'm terrible at putting thoughts down in words, and I also didn't know how else to word this anyway.

[vanished]

don't do this if you have important files on the computer, but...

• switch user to root
• get a directory listing of the whole machine.  (recursive ls)
  • save to file
• randomly remove lines until maybe 20 remain.  Do not take note of which ones remain.  This needs to be a surprise/mystery to you
• delete those files
• have fun

[MatazaNZ]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

don't do this if you have important files on the computer, but...

• switch user to root
• get a directory listing of the whole machine.  (recursive ls)
  • save to file
• randomly remove lines until maybe 20 remain.  Do not take note of which ones remain.  This needs to be a surprise/mystery to you
• delete those files
• have fun

Damn, that sounds like quite a break  

There will not be any important files on the machine, it will pretty much be fresh installs

[Master Disaster]

From login screen do CTRL&F1,  login as root then execute the following command... 

rm -rf /

You'll never recover from that without a full reinstall! 

[Linus_torvalds]

LOL when i first started writing shell scripts things were breaking all over the system  Then i had to recover everything. It turns out to be preaty good practice, because now i fix problems faster then before and for many things i do not even need google...

I can't tell how to break system intentionally, i was doing it naturally. 

[MSWindowsinside]

I've found that if you'd install old or a lot of packages on a new Ubuntu version, a dependency hell will break lose. I've never been able to recover from that. Try installing an entire category of applications in aptitude and see for yourself. After that, try apt-get update and see all the errors it (probably) spits out.

[WiiManic]

You could try a new install of Linux and purposefully install an old version of software, then update it and try to fix that.

The only real trouble I've had is when my window manager messed up and changed its properties, so it refused to load properly once updated.

Oh and some problems where I've had out of date keys of package maintainers so I can't update, but I can't update the keys because the package manager needs updating, but I can't update that since the keys are out of date.....Carried on like that till I removed the other package manager, updated the rest of the system and reinstalled.

 

But really, you probably won't be able to practise that well. Most problems you'll have to fix as you go, the only ones you can look for are the common ones and they'll be the easiest to fix anyways. As long as you make sure you are competent in the terminal and know your way around the file structures, you should be able to fix most things with that and the help of google/forums. 

[vorticalbox]

Linux not unlike windows tends to be able to break its self. Corrupted profile in chromium chrome settings wouldn't open and my theme decided it didn't want to work today.

 

 

[Sauron]

open a terminal emulator, type

rm -rf ../

and press enter. Good luck. (Unlike what @Master Disaster suggested this is recoverable if you execute it from within your home folder, which is where bash will default to)

[Sauron]

On 6/6/2016 at 11:35 PM, vorticalbox said:

Linux not unlike windows tends to be able to break its self. Corrupted profile in chromium chrome settings wouldn't open and my theme decided it didn't want to work today.

I'd say Linux is much more willing to break itself than Windows actually. If you provide the root password there's nothing it will refuse to do unless it's physically impossible.