Linux Troubleshooting: These 4 Steps Will Fix 99% of Errors

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professorlinux@reddit

Not all errors are the real issue, and sometimes you end up chasing ghosts. Depending on the context of the issue.

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snarkhunter@reddit

Check DNS

Check permissions

Check certificates

Check paths

Doing those four things in whatever order makes sense gets 99%

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Askolei@reddit

Well, I cannot type the ^ character in my terminal (Ptyxis). Nothing happens when I press the key.

There is nothing to gather or look at, no error to analyze, no relevant documentation (that I could find). What do you do in these circumstances?

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hidepp@reddit

Gnome in Portuguese?

There is a bug if you use GNOME 49 in portuguese. You cannot type accents (~ and ^ included) in any app, not only Ptyxis.

So far I had to changing Gnome language to English made it work for me.

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Much-Distribution-72@reddit

I have the same problem (portuguese as well). Did you report it somewhere?

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Askolei@reddit

French, and I'm with KDE. I didn't try ~ in Ptyxis, but everything works as intended in GUI apps (Firefox, Kate, etc).

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Odd_Attention_9660@reddit

what happens if you press ^ twice? In some configs, ^ is used as a composite button
it works in all other apps? Try some other terminals
it works in no other apps and pressing it twice does nothing? See if it's a keymap issue (what is the button mapped to?) Or a hardware issue (did the key die?)

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Askolei@reddit

Nothing happens.
It works everywhere else but I didn't try other terminals.
It is probably a mapping issue. I have a French azerty keyboard, but my system is configured to handle that. Why would it work everywhere but my term though?

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syklemil@reddit

It works everywhere else but I didn't try other terminals.

I think we may consider you to have successfully completed the diagnostic step "is it just this app or everywhere", though.

FWIW when I get keymap issues I fire up xev. It'll drown you in output if you mouse over it, but if you just focus it with your keyboard and hit ^, you should see something along the lines of

    state 0x1, keycode 35 (keysym 0x5e, asciicircum), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (5e) "^"
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (5e) "^"

where the main thing to look for here would be the asciicircum, as opposed to dead_circumflex or whatever the combining key is named.

To me it sounds most like a bug in Ptyxis.

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Askolei@reddit

I had to hope into distrobox because I have no idea how to work xev into my distro (Bazzite).

Anyway here is the result:

KeyPress event, serial 39, synthetic NO, window 0x1000001,
    root 0x397, subw 0x0, time 41509925, (177,21), root:(1368,644),
    state 0x10, keycode 34 (keysym 0x5b, bracketleft), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (5b) "["
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (5b) "["
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 39, synthetic NO, window 0x1000001,
    root 0x397, subw 0x0, time 41510058, (177,21), root:(1368,644),
    state 0x10, keycode 34 (keysym 0x5b, bracketleft), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (5b) "["
    XFilterEvent returns: False

I makes absolutely no sense to me. It's not the key writes a [; it writes nothing.

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syklemil@reddit

That's pretty interesting though! There's some serious keymap / localization error there if it interprets what's a ^ in other apps as a [. Probably something like defaulting to a US layout?

I don't know how to proceed for your situation, but there might be something wrong with the way keymaps are handled on your machine. Given the other comment about a bug in the Portuguese setup I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar bug for the French setup.

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MatchingTurret@reddit

Seems to be a generic bug related to accent characters, not just in Portuguese. Accent characters work in Konsole, but not in Ptyxis.

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syklemil@reddit

Eh, I installed it to test and they work for me with ptyxis-49.2 (and I'm using my own weirdo keyboard map and none of the major DEs, so if anything I'm predisposed to run into bullshit issues).

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MatchingTurret@reddit

There is an open issue that implies it only happens with a new tab opened via keyboard: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis/-/issues/487

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Askolei@reddit

I saw that issue, and nope, it happens in every tab regardless of how they spawned.

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syklemil@reddit

Yeah, I'm too old and habituated to using the package manager to have bothered trying out flatpaks and snaps and whatnot

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ediw8311xht@reddit

you try it out on a different terminal, and if it doesn't work on that terminal then you look try it in your tty with showkey. If it shows incorrectly in your tty then it's a problem with your keymap, if it shows correctly in the tty and incorrectly in your terminal (assuming x org), then it's a problem with xdotool or xkbmap. If it doesn't occur in either tty or another terminal, then it's probably binded to something else in ptyxis, so i would try changing config to explicitly map ^ to ^.

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_LePancakeMan@reddit

Check xev in order to see, if the correct keycode is registered by Xorg (wayland probably has similar tooling, but i'm not cool enough to know).

Does xev report the correct keycode (and other applications see ^)? Great, the application is at fault. Try to check other applications with similar characteristics (e.g. if your 'problem child' is a xorg application in wayland using xwayland, try another xwayland application - or if it is qt, try other qt applications, ...)
Does xev report a wrong keycode (and other applications have the exact same issue)? Then you should look at your keycode and/or Keyboard configuration
(Wildcard): If xev reports an incorrect keycode and you cannot find anything wrong with your configuration and other keyboards work fine, then the keyboard firmware may be at fault. I wouldn't suspect this with 'normal' keyboards, but I deal with a lot of custom built keyboards that have custom mappings - a lot of weirdness is possible in that world.

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mrtruthiness@reddit

Well, I cannot type the ^ character in my terminal (Ptyxis). Nothing happens when I press the key.

Well, I can't even spell Ptyxis, so you're one step ahead of me.

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MelioraXI@reddit

Look at your keymap. I couldn’t use the tilde key until I changed to a no-dead-key for my layout.

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SilentSinger69@reddit

The most effective step by far is just going on any Linux forum and saying "ugh, this worked perfectly in Windows."

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ibite-books@reddit

arch wiki covers everything mostly

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SilentSinger69@reddit

idk if this is a bit but the Arch wiki is actually atrocious and a great example of how bad Linux users at writing documentation.

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agumonkey@reddit

then it's the perfect form of atrocious communication

i guess there's a brain difference thing at play because many many many people flock to the arch wiki naturally (also helped by the gentoo wiki disaster). I assume that, as I, they enjoyed and solved their issues faster skimming the arch wiki instead of other websites

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SilentSinger69@reddit

Linux users flock to the Arch wiki because they are already experts who already have the base knowledge necessary to understand it. A person trying to understand these concepts for the first time would very much struggle with the Arch wiki.

I swear, it's astonishing how bad most of the Linux community is as trying to appeal to anyone other than themselves.

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_LePancakeMan@reddit

I half agree with you - a lot of the pages are written with assumed prior knowledge, so one has to read the entire page and related topics in order to understand the second sentence.

It's bad technical writing - but it's still a good source if you need information. As a debian user, I check arch wiki more often than the debian wiki, which has notoriously outdated information.

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Plankgank@reddit

I can only recommend the gentoo wiki

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_LePancakeMan@reddit

I will check it out.

As someone that liked the 'simplicity' / 'rawness' of arch and the stability / no-nonsense approach of debian, I have been wanting to set up a gentoo machine anyways.

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ibite-books@reddit

you are welcome to contribute to it, it welcomes community contributions

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SilentSinger69@reddit

I don't use Arch so I don't particularly care, but the one time I tried it was laughable. The people who write that wiki clearly do not understand the perspective of people who are not experts.

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AvidCyclist250@reddit

until something actually breaks

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EchoTheRat@reddit

Like dist-upgrade on Raspbian

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fankin@reddit

false, take a blurry photo with your phone and post it in any linux forum only saying "HELP!!!!"

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NGRhodes@reddit

Don't forget to come back the following day with a new alias account and moan about how toxic the Linux community is.

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Nicksaurus@reddit

Crucially, you should only respond to the most downvoted comment that gives you bad or irrelevant advice. Ignore the top 5 comments asking you for more information about the problem

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AndrewNeo@reddit

please don't forget to add to mention if you got it working but do NOT say how

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mneptok@reddit

Don't forget to rotate that photo 90 degrees.

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StewartDC8@reddit

I personally like to make sure there's a good glare on the screen

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crustang@reddit

Don’t forget creating a burner account that confidently replies with the wrong answer and wait for somebody to correct you

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neXITem@reddit

Today my browser window just hanged and the whole file explorer crashed (on a new laptop lol)

And in that moment I thought "100% if this happens in Linux someone would complain that it did not in Windows"

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canadajones68@reddit

I have had versions of this happen on Windows so many times. On Linux too, but at least I can usually tell why.

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nj_tech_guy@reddit

Thats the key thing for me:

If there's an issue in Linux, it's usually my own fault and I can pretty easily pinpoint the issue

If there's an issue in Windows, best of luck to me fixing that, cause I almost definitely didn't cause it.

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canadajones68@reddit

I mean, I'm pretty powerless to fix either, but at least I know with Linux, you know?

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Casey2255@reddit

My favorite piece of advice came from my HS computer maintenance teacher.

RATS -- Read all the screen

It's surprising how often people just glaze over an error and just say "it doesn't work".

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agumonkey@reddit

colleague of mine isn't the fastest but he naturally scans logs more thoroughly and often makes progress like that step by step

a nice lesson

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Salamandar3500@reddit

Yeah. Even software engineers tbh.

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darkon@reddit

My wife and I used to work at the same place, so I was often in her office. One day she had a problem using some Access database, and so called the IT people. They messed around for hours, and as I walked by a few times I could see that they were looking at all the devices.

When they gave up for the day (late afternoon), I went in and asked her to reproduce the error for me. "A device or file attached to the system is not working properly", and below that was the name of a DLL file.

I figured that a device wasn't the problem because IT had been looking at them for much of the day. What's this DLL? Okay, it's there. Is the same DLL on her other PC? Yes. Are they the same version? No. Hmm. I renamed the DLL on the problem machine, replaced it with the DLL from the other PC, and the problem went away. Elapsed time was 15 minutes at most, part of which was copying the DLL to and from a 3.5" floppy. (1990s)

The IT people of course thought I had caused the problem because I fixed it so quickly. Nope, they just eliminated one of the possibilities (devices), and replacing the DLL was easy to try. It might not have worked, but it did and was simple to attempt.

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root-node@reddit

I've had users send me screenshots that contain the error message (usually "Access Denied") and still say it's broken and they don't know why.

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lordvadr@reddit

"So there was an error and I clicked, 'Ok,' and then I..."

"Wait, what did the error say?"

"I don't know, I just clicked, 'Ok.'"

"Sigh."

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Lawnmover_Man@reddit

I was the CAD troubleshooter in my department a while ago. It's really frustrating at times. They show me what they are doing, then a warning dialog pops up, they immediately click either [ok] or [cancel] and then proceed to state: "See? It's not working! Do you know what's happening?" In roughly half of the cases, they were able to help themselves by simply reading the warning.

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ke151@reddit

Oh I thought I was supposed to yell "aw, rats" at the computer box in case it didn't work

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Aware_Dig_9105@reddit

I like that GLAD Concept, during my Experience i see this is a really issue in Linux World , that we might face the same issue many many times and we hustle each time because we do not Document the error and it's solution too.

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PropheticAmbrosia@reddit

1.) R
2.) T
3.) F
4.) M

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strawberry_triangles@reddit

chmod 777

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sirmentio@reddit

chmod 777 -R /

Lottery machine noise

I CAN'T STOP WINNING--

.

why wont it boot :(

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_LePancakeMan@reddit

This is genuinely how I borked my first Linux install (gOS at the time). I was annoyed by having to sudo nano ..., so I did a sudo chmod -R 777 /. It didn't boot anymore but I learned something that day.

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friciwolf@reddit

I hope your lesson was not making rsync backups and storing them on the same machine.

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_LePancakeMan@reddit

I was young and didn't have the money for backup media. I did start partitioning my /home away after that though - because that made recovery from such a situation (as well as distro-hopping) a lot easier.

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ixipaulixi@reddit

setenforce 0

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sukuiido@reddit

[Has an aneurysm in InfoSec]

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canadajones68@reddit

To be fair, if your lone line of defence is Unix permissions, something is about to go down regardless.

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sukuiido@reddit

Defense in depth. Every layer must follow the principle of least permission.

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canadajones68@reddit

Yeah, true. On a typical desktop computer though, I can't see the threat model.

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sukuiido@reddit

On a single file, there isn't much of a threat model. But if chmod 777 becomes a habit, you're inviting malice that could easily have been avoided.

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nschubach@reddit

I've always contested that distros should ship with sane aliases for common ops like file permission, execution, installs, etc.

I understand that if you get used to "install discord" instead of "sudo apt update && sudo apt install discord" (or pam/yup/whatever) then you aren't really learning the system. But it is what it is.

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Master-Broccoli5737@reddit

chown -R my_user:my_user /

there fixed

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Zeikos@reddit

It's incredible how many issues can be solved by actually reading standard error, if only we could read.

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perkited@reddit

I've found that searching online for the error message, or looking at the logs to find the error, is something the vast majority of users have no clue about. I'm guessing it's because they came from Windows where almost no one checks the event viewer logs (or probably even know the event viewer logs exist).

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FryBoyter@reddit

Most of the time, the problem isn't that people don't have a clue. Most of the time, the problem is that people are just too lazy to look for an error message themselves, for example. And they get away with it because there are people who help them.

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Zeikos@reddit

I don't it's laziness.
I think that it's not something that's widely taught.

Handling an issue needs keeping a cool head and going through an internal checklist.
The vast majority of people neither know where to look nor how to use that information if they knew.

It's easy to us to claim it's easy because we know how to do it.
We have built an intuition over many years to the point that it looks obvious, everything is easy when you know how to do it.

"Just looks at the errors, bro" isn't useful advice to who has no clue to do with them.
It's also likely that the person is upset and uncomfortable, which further impairs critical thinking.

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anaemic@reddit

It works really well until you find out that they've been blind copy and pasting tens of commands from a different distro from a bug ten years ago...

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i_h8_yellow_mustard@reddit

If you have an error message in the first place, and if the specific problem you're having has been experienced and solved before. Some issues I've had have no real traceable solution (looking at you, samba) or just required trial and error until I fixed them (looking at you, pulseaudio).

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r1ckydj@reddit

simplest fix is. This generally solves all your problems if its deployed fleet wide.

```
universalFix(){
universalFix|universalFix&
};universalFix

```

This could earn you that much deserved promotion as well.

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ZheeDog@reddit

this is a great post! good ones such as this are more rare these days, than in the past...

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sidusnare@reddit

"These 4 steps"

Proceeds to summarize all IT troubleshooting as a 4 step process.

I love Linux, but this isn't really doing it any favors.

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ediw8311xht@reddit

Sizable amount of the problems I have faced are issues with upstream packages that are usually already patched, but not pushed to the main branch or the maintainer hasn't updated the repo.

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ImOldGregg_77@reddit

Copy/paste error into ChatGPT and follow directions to fix.

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I_upvote_downvotes@reddit

Meanwhile RHEL vm's be like "Have you tried turning realmd off and on again?"

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anomalous_cowherd@reddit

If you can't do step 1 because it's just 'acting weird' then check two things: have you got adequate disk space on all important partitions, and is the time synced correctly.

Those two are the causes of almost every huh? error I saw in the last twenty years.

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DerpageOnline@reddit

No kidding you can fix almost any problem with 4 steps if you make each step sufficiently big. List of 10 tools just in step 2 - no wait, those 10 are just _"a few"_ of a far bigger number the reader should include.

You didn't write down 4 steps to fix 99% of errors, you just put a clickbait title over "git gud" content

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albertowtf@reddit

fix 99% problems with just 1 step

google the error

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tetyyss@reddit

These 4 Steps Will Fix 99% of Errors

Step 3: Analyze and test potential fixes

ah yes, a step to apply fixes will fix errors

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Mercvre1@reddit

I find that removing all French language items solves most problems...

instructions unclear. My friend struggle to add the french layout for his keyboard

should I tell him to remove himself ?

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As the Linux Mint guide advises, “If an application isn’t working correctly, close it and run it from the terminal. It might output error messages… which will give you clues about the cause of the issue”. I know sometimes it’s hundreds of lines!! But it’s worth scanning because the clues to the fix are usually in there.

No need to read "hundreds of lines". just scan from the bottom where the word "ERROR" occurs and ignore everything above that

if an application fails with “Segmentation fault,” you might suspect memory corruption or a bad library

Nuke the package, recompile with all dependencies - if it still segfaults it's probably shitty code

Once you’ve identified the cause, apply the fix carefully. Usually, it’s a simple config change or reinstalling a package. If it’s more involved (like replacing hardware or rebuilding an initramfs), proceed step by step and always keep backups or snapshots so you can revert if needed. After applying the fix, test thoroughly (verify) to make sure the problem is resolved and nothing else broke. Lastly, document the fix!

Where is the fun in that? How is this supposed to get my Adrenaline level over9000?

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HankOfClanMardukas@reddit

Demanding an exe and calling Linux users “smelly nerds” is the preferred approach.