2022-12-22
Tried Debian Testing (Bookworm) for a while recently both on my laptop (vanilla Debian with MATE desktop) and on one Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi OS with the Pixel desktop). Eventually things just broke in ways that got me fed up. It really sucked when the laptop broke because I didn't know how to create a new boot image without it. The things that broke were Network Manager and the graphic desktop. I can do without the latter, but how do i get a new image without the former? It was Friday evening and my work laptop was at the office.
Thankfully I remembered that I've recently taken custody of a similar old laptop from my mum. It still runs Windows (ugh, the horrible experience). Though it was a bit of a pain I could eventually download a Debian Stable (Bullseye) image and write it to a USB stick.
The re-installation of the laptop went well, and then I went to bed.
The morning after I discovered that the one user I'd created didn't have sudo privileges, and I'd already forgotten the root password. For a moment I thought I'd have to re-do the whole thing, but then I had a better idea. I just booted into the live environment on the USB stick, mounted the computer's drive, and added my user to the sudo group in the /etc/group file.
Done and done.
I've now used my own laptop with the fresh install to download a new Raspberry Pi OS image, write it to a microSD card, and inserted that into the Raspberry Pi. There's a bit of config to do before it's the way I want it, but it works again!
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal