Comment by cptnapalm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cptnapalm | Hacker News Reader

Feeling this acutely today. I switched my home desktop from Arch to Ubuntu since there is some software in the AUR that I want to use, but the package builds are broken. Arch is a community project so, not blaming anyone except the guy that randomly decided to rebase his package on the git without telling anyone and didn't bother to find out what the dependencies are.

Anyway, got everything set up. Everything working fine. Rebooted a few times: no problem. Popped in an extra hard drive which is just for file storage for Steam games. Reboot and... nothing. Pulled the hard drive. Nothing. The operating system is now in a completely broken state. No start up messages, nothing. Not even NumLock on the keyboard works.

I have no idea what happened.

Try reseating your RAM, reattaching your hdd cables. If you can't get to BIOS, it's nothing to do with a secondary hard drive.

I've encountered issues that must have been BIOS bugs such as hanging before the BIOS screen with a corrupted Linux drive plugged in but working just fine with it disconnected. Trust nothing.

It's an older Mac Pro: all UEFI and sleds rather than cables. I can try doing the RAM reseating, but the Mac Pro won't even go to EFI if it thinks there's something wrong with the RAM; how I found that out: I initially didn't know you couldn't mix 16GB sticks with other sizes but know that now.

Oh, I used to run Ubuntu! After going to and from sleep mode, the audio would stop working. The proposed solution was to change a line of code and rebuild the OS from source. Then they ask why your grandmother doesn't want open source — must be a corporate conspiracy.

Haha, very funny.

Disclaimer: been running Ubuntu Studio for 10 years, and it is still the #1 music-/audio- processing system in my studio, which of course has great MacOS stuff too, but still .. UbuntuStudio .. just freakin' great audio, on Linux. Suspends just fine too.

(Clue: its jackd. I nuked pulseaudio from orbit.)

Switching distros seems a little drastic given the problem. Why not just fix the AUR package? That'd probably take less time than reconfiguring everything.

I'd check the boot drive on another machine and see if something messed up your fstab.

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