It isn’t, I admit. But the first impression is intimidating.

Monolith is a word that fits Debian very well.

It’s like a landmark. It just exists and reality itself seems to bend around it.

I ran a Debian machine, a laptop, until the hardware literally gave up. Eight years of solid service. Regular updates and one reinstall to move to the next version.

It kept working. It kept playing music, playing videos, managing my office needs, surfing the web and receiving my email. Flawlessly.

It outperformed newer machines in its last years and people could not wrap their heads around the notion.

Debian, as a Linux+FOSS combo is a winner combo

True.

As someone that started in Linux, for real, with Debian, and in a time that I had to mannually install my graphics card, I learned the way I did things on Debian was significantly different from things got done on other distro families. That, alone, kept faithful to the Debian tree.

I’ve been in a situation like this recently and all I can say is that the CLI is universal.

Yes, it is complex. Yes, it is challenging. But it gets things done.

Don’t be afraid.

Because lazyness.

I’ve worn down a stove and two electric ovens, about to go on my third, over the course of twenty years, and I always aim for the simplest of the simplest possible.

No pyrolisis function, no steam function.

Just plain convection ovens, ventilated. And if non digital models are to be found, even better.

We can say everything was kept in the family, that way.

Stupid remarks on the side: that must have been really confusing.

That reads as a joke.

So, if I correctly understood, you are now your son’s son-in-law, while marrying your granddaughter-in-law.

That’s convoluted.

Just scrawl something. Anything. Doesn’t really matter and that is the point. It is just about stating that you can do something, by yourself. Do a tetris like shape. Write something and add some unnecessary curves or angles to each letter. Don’t care about the what. Care about the trying.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Update - 2026.01.12

After trying to follow all advices I was given and failling miserably, I caved in and reinstalled the entire system, this time using a Debian Stable Live Image.

The drives were there - sda and sbd - the SSD and the HDD, respectively. sda was partioned from 1 through 5, while sbd had one single partition. As I had set during the installation. No error here.

However, when trying to look into /etc/fstab, the file listed exactly nothing. Somehow, the file was never written. I could list the devices through ls /dev/sd* but when trying to mount any one of it, it returned the location was not listed under /etc/fstab. And I even tried to update the file, mannually, yet the non existence of the drives persisted.

Yes, as I write this from the freshly installed Debian, I am morbidly curious to go read the file now. See how much has changed.

Because at this point I understood I wouldn’t be going anywhere with my attemps, I opted to do a full reinstall. And it was as I was, again, manually partitoning the disk to what I wanted that I found the previous instalation had created a strange thing.

While all partions had a simple sd* indicator, the partition that should have been / was instead named “Debian Forky” and was not configured as it shoud. It had no root flag. It was just a named partition in the disk.

I may be reading too much into this but most probably this simple quirk botched the entire installation. The system could not run what simply wasn’t there and it could not find an sda2 if that sda2 was named as something completely different.

Lessons to be taken

I understood I wasn’t clear enough of how experienced with Debian I was. I ran Debian for several years and, although not a power-user, I gained a lot of knowledge about managing my own system tinkering in Debian, something I lost when I moved towards more up-to-date distros, more user-friendly, but less powerful learning tools. And after this, I recognized I need that “demand” from the system to learn. So, I am glad I am back to Debian.

Thank you for all the help and I can only hope I can returned it some day.

We’ll live to be old and so will our offspring. How the world will be by then is the great question.

If the man was still alive, he would be salivating for what it is being done right now. It’s the original agenda, on steroids, revised, fine tuned and turbo charged.

It was a military coup inside a military coup inside a military coup.

The original coup that instated the regime was a revolt led by high officials in the wake of a scandalous counterfeit money scheme. The post WWI military felt their wages shrink in purchasing power and pointed fingers at the very unstable and young republican goverment.

Hence the coup and following fifty years of fascism that by all measures was instated against the military plans. They wanted a military-run country. They apointed a general for president. He appointed a strongman for running the daily affairs. The civilians still got back the true governing and the military were pushed aside.

Come 1974, it was a rebellion of low ranking officers that threw the regime, with a good dose of communist (read popular) insatisfaction into the mix.

To quote the head officer:

"Meus senhores, como todos sabem, há diversas modalidades de Estado. Os estados socialistas, os estados capitalistas e o estado a que chegámos. Ora, nesta noite solene, vamos acabar com o estado a que chegámos!”

Running a state is a job for civilians. Making sure those civilians toe the line is the military to enforce, after the population set it. In 2013 we had the military remembering the then government remembering it was their sworn duty to uphold and defend the Constitution, which was constantly being ignored by several attempts of law.

Going to separate houses for the night.

One way or another, we need to live. And it is impossible, for all practical purposes, to produce everything we need to lead a well balanced and reasonable life.

It holds a degree of validity, but like all absolutes, it leaves out everything between complete lack and total abuse.

Search enough and you’ll discover that every company on the planet has some shady stuff in the closet.

Best we can do is support the small, more ethical, companies and exploit to our best the others.

They are free to talk about theirs, if they are willing to hear about my own beliefs or lack thereof.

Being laic, religion is of no concern to me in my daily life. I do accept others don’t have the same view and stance and if that brings them joy and a feeling of sense to their life, great.

As long they respect me in return.

I’ve made my peace with the threats of damnation. I fear humans more than I fear demons. And I only need to casually surf the web to take a look into hell.

So, I’m good.

It’s hard to pass as “sound investment”, also.

Wait! Isn’t socialism, according to the american doctrine, a very bad thing?

I developed the habit of formatting my disks before a new install, so I’m going to push that hypothesis aside for now.

Before installing Debian I tried Sparky and I noticed it had set up a /boot_EFI and a /boot partition, which sounded off to me, so I wiped the SSD clean and manually partioned it, leaving only a 1GB /boot, configured for EFI.

NVRAM is not completely off the board but I find it odd to just flare up as an issue now, under Debian, and having no problems under Mint or Sparky.

I’m fairly confident at this point that the worst of my problems is to be found between the chair and the keyboard.