Debian User Forums

To keep it brief, I am NOT asking for help but rather for speculations for the occurence that I will describe below , so as to prevent this from happening again on my system.

I made around four snapshots at one point in time for my system backups on my linux root partition.

Then I decided for some reason to delete all of them(most probably to free up space), so I did Ctrl+A and selected all my snapshots , all four of them and deleted them using the Timeshift application.
Then I made a new snapshot once the deletion was done using the create button. The new snapshot was created successfully and I was happy. (Little did I know what was about to happen next)

Now you see, I experimented on my system with packages and compiling and eventually made a mess of my system, nothing with removing packages or installing something from custom PPAs , just some git
clone,failed compiling and creation of a failed systemd service. Nothing related to deleting files either. The packages acquired during compilation were installed using default Debian repositories.

So I decided to restore the snapshot of my system using Timeshift , selected my root drive , boot drive , checked details and hit restore after which the operation failed, my KDE 5 plasma setup broke, I did a force restart and was dropped into the BusyBox shell, after inspection with a live usb I found to my horror that half of the linux filesystem was broken and missing system packages, like there were only 4 folders in my root filesystem.

Thankfully the home partition was untouched so I backed up my files and did a fresh install. Now what could have caused it, idk truly, I am eager to hear possible speculations .

The only two custom non debian-default repositories that I had added and installed packages from were: 1.WineHQ and 2.Xanmod Kernel
1. WineHQ - Pretty self explanatory.
2.Xanmod Kernel - Because I had issues with sleep and suspend due to a common kernel bug in the version bundled with debian.

My speculation is that Xanmod caused this breakage, especially because Debian is so very specific about the software it bundles which adds to its stability, having a custom newer kernel which probably wasn't made for Debian specifically , more made for Ubuntu and Linux Mint in mind could very well be the issue.

Replacing stock Debian packages with custom ones from different repositories that weren't specifically made for Debian in mind should only cause breakages. And I hope that this speculation is true.

Any other ideas ?

My experiences have taught me to never compile any projects with the options. Especially not with elevated privileges. I've had similar happen to me as a result. I don't know why that is either.

It is much, much better practice to just run a plain make command as an unprivileged user and then later just launch the program by invoking the binary manually with ./path/to/build/some_binary.

Had you run any sudo make install something while compiling software?

Uptorn wrote: 2024-10-10 14:25 My experiences have taught me to never compile any projects with the

Code: Select all

make install

options. Especially not with elevated privileges. I've had similar happen to me as a result. I don't know why that is either.

It is much, much better practice to just run a plain make command as an unprivileged user and then later just launch the program by invoking the binary manually with ./path/to/build/some_binary.

Had you run any sudo make install something while compiling software?

Well actually , the program did not even compile normally ! I had to use a different approach to compile it but the snapshot was taken before any of the operations began so I do not think it would have caused issues.
No I did not run anything with sudo make install or anything like that.

Were you using BTRFS or EXT4 with Timeshift?

d4rkb4sh8 wrote: 2024-10-14 19:52 Were you using BTRFS or EXT4 with Timeshift?

EXT4