i was going to make some kind of joke about maybe computer bugs but i need to be able find this later too jdsjd

5/19/26: read to disk (fsck) error

approach to what i thought was broken:

• cause i rebooted after uninstalling havegeds im like 'oh shit' cause i might not be able to repopulate the entropy, but it still loaded everything after luks

what was actually wrong:

• guess who decided uninstalling udiskie was a good idea <- this fool !!
• anyway i reinstalled it back in the tty cause i forgot it was necessary for wayland conf and reading to hard drive

5/19/26: havegeds + pintheft mitigation

• i uninstalled havegeds for nwg-tools cause there was a recent exploit found for it, as well as created the conf file for pintheft.
  • btw there is a conflict error for nwg-tools and openrc but i just replaced the file with the openrc one in /etc when i installed the former first. seems to work alright so far unlike that damned initramfs file that one time
  • it was my first time doing a printf command but i had to use sudo tee instead cause of the way my system reads to files (and because i dont give myself permissions using chown just in case things happen)

5/9/26: Emergency Shell

• you guys are going to love this one because it happened to me yesterday and ohohhh boy...that was a fun misadventure that lasted all morning.
• overview of error: cannot find dev/mapper/cryptluks..skipping fsck..cannot find root=/dev/mapper/cryptluks yada yada no block device tty has been disabled, dropping you into emergency shell

approach to what may have been broken:

• corruption of linux image / HDD <- cause i could input my psswd for luks just not after it unlocked
• the packages itself that i installed from repos caused it to break <- as sometimes newer packages can cause kernel panic
• the mkinitcpio conf that i touched before reboot after my installed packages cause i replaced it with the pacnew that was made (because i saw it from my terminal).. <- encrypt is not a default hook so that messed up things quite a bit!

what i actually had to do:

• drop into live iso from my USB
• mount both my /boot and /mnt for my encrypted hard drive
  • the way that needs to be done for encrypted disks is creating a cryptroot
• chroot and rebuild the linux install
• regenerate the initramfs
• all has to been done in chroot so i kept forgetting not to exit first
• unmount the /mnt
  • typically that solves normal corruption but in my case...
• the hooks file needed to be edited to include 'encrypt'
• the other problem lied in not having my keyfile from root being pointed to as well. im not really sure why(?) as it is not the case for others who had a similar bug, but i thought it was for my default keyrings <- after looking it up it is important to luks to be able to open the stored password without multiple requests ooooh.

what i learned from this:

• not to touch that damn conf file again
• more under the hood about what luks does and in handling chroot because i didn't need to do that yet for anything
• i got pretty lucky that it wasn't a hard drive failure cause this thing is going on almost its sixth year of usage, and because i bought it refurbished second-hand.

5/9/26: Recreating Swap

• overview of error: swap disabled after i logged back in

approach to what may have been broken:

• i saw that there was 18gb worth of encryption for my primary disk, but that shouldn't have been the case since luks opens at boot after my psswd
• honestly i also considered dirtyfrag because there isn't a patch for it right now and is the latest exploit, and devices can be attacked locally
• my third partition was also encrypted with luks when i checked it out in my terminal <- i think because i accidentally mounted it in live USB with a passwd, but luckily i used the same one to open it again

what i actually had to do:

• recreate the swap using the partition
• add it to fstab using the UUID <- i really like doing it this way so it helps me keep the partitions organized
• add flags for swap
  • so what's interesting is that it doesn't have 'defaults' so it's none swap sw 00

what i learned from this:

• how to make swap in case i need to do again (and most likely) in the future
• the difference between the default flags and the numbers indicated at the end that display it in the bootloader

3/27/26: First install of Artix Linux

• first time installation (-Syyu) for updating mirror database
• populating keys with init
• learning basic nano commands
  • ctrl + K = deleting one entire line
  • ctrl + shft + 6 = delete multiple lines

3/28/26: Nvidia drivers installation error

• had to uninstall and then reinstall linux-firmware because of the conflicts with packages using the xfce desktop environment
  • i think this has been patched with the latest iso so it's not much of an issue to encounter very often

3/31/26: Built my first package from source

• it was vscodium, and honestly it was pretty nerve-wracking to follow the steps to do it, including using the pkg command since i'd never done it before.
  • do not do what i did by only copying the git repo url from the AUR, you can and because the steps are well laid out on the official website, but typically if it matches the repo and the source code is squeaky clean, but heavy emphasis on this not always being the case!!! i just knew what to do from prior experiences.