System fried

[paul1149]

For some reason I had been unable to install wine, I kept on getting null sets of programs to install, notification of broken packages and missing dependencies. I am on MX Linux with the KDE desktop.

From this nearby thread

viewtopic.php?t=37071#

I got this command for installing wine.

sudo apt install --install-recommends wine-staging-i386:i386

And so after purging prior attempts at installing wine, I ran the above command. It listed a lot of dependencies that were going to be installed I think the total was about 250 MB and the total increase to the drive was approaching 2 GB. Fine. I okayed the command and it began to work.

A moment later I looked at the command output and noticed that it was removing things. A lot of things. Things that had nothing to do with wine. It was removing apps and services, and apparently things necessary to the system.

Believing I was stuck I just let it run. In a couple of minutes the display went off and 20 minutes later I killed the session and rebooted. That is,, I tried to reboot. The system is fried.

So I'm wondering what happened. How is it that a simple command to install a program would lead to the destruction of a system? This was a new system that I was just finishing setting up, so I have no system image backup. It's all lost, a day's work. This whole thing is beyond my understanding how this could happen.

[invisible kid]

I guess this is an apt issue and I kind of agree. People who are savvy with apt are able to stay on top of it and massage installs/removals into order, but I've ran into messes with apt removing tons of stuff. Like you discovered, the time to make sure it is correct is before any reboot. Sorry it happened, hopefully you get back to where you were.

[paul1149]

Thanks. This comes on the heels of my tower melting down last week, due to a bad Asus motherboard. So that's why this is a new install on an old laptop, to tide me over until the new MB came back. I think this time what I will do, is dig out the hard drive my image backup was on, set it up in an external caddy., And restore from image my old setup, which was working fine.

It is definitely disconcerting that anything remotely like what happened here is possible. There ought to be multiple fail safes involved to protect the user. Live and learn, and sometimes there's no substitute for experience, no matter how suboptimal that experience may be.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving!

[invisible kid]

I agree. I vaguely remember removing a single application and it completely removed x11. Either that or something similar. I had to keep ping-pong installing/removing until I got it fixed if I ever did. Happy Thanksgiving!