most of us started off unlucky........what was your worst linux experience?

mine was reinstalling suse 9.3 over 10 times in one week ! Problem was me messing with configuration or kernel.

Mandrake 8.0. First boot I got the "respawning" error. When I got past that one, Mandrake would not shutdown and forced shutdowns caused more reinstalls. The shutdown problem was something to do with the network name if I remember right. It took a long time to get past the problems.

Trying to install Libranet 2.8.1.

It asks so many questions that are unnecessary. It didn't recognize my sound card or my mouse. It was painful. I just gave up and used another distro. I hope Libranet 3.0 is much better.

My old computer had an internal software modem, I think that says all it needs to

rm -rf /

Ouch... Luckily mine was just having problems with X and sitting with a black screen for a while.

I was a complete newbie to Linux and using Mandrake and got the respawning error on my first install. Then on subsequent installs my sound card wouldn't be detected, I would try to install themes or icons and keep getting error messages, programs would crash and I couldn't figure out why, basically if it could go wrong it did and that was about 3 years ago now.

Mandrake Luckily it was gone a minute after I first booted into it.

i was brand new to linux, first distro install was red hat 9 that i bought from staples...it never worked...i'm pretty sure if i move the letters around enough times in "red hat nine" it will spell 'nightmare'...at least, thats what i ended up with...then i grabbed a copy of suse 8.2, which was amazing, and started me on my way...
and i haven't looked back since...

Unrecognized video driver with knoppix 9.0. X problems in Debian.

I upgraded Konqueror and it altered a setting from "view" to "execute" when a shell script was clicked.

It renamed all my files and folders in my home directory (Fortunately not recursively...).

after running SuSE 8.2 (w/ KDE) for about a week and thinking I was pretty clever, Gnome started popping up... and up... and up.... and I suddenly had hundreds of Gnome windows of some sort... I don't recall whick Gnome application it was, but it wasn't fun (nor was Gnome even supposedly installed...). I tried to close them and more would open. I thought, oh its worse than M$! Popups everywhere!

Turns out I had blown a capacitor in my moboard; replacing that made life sweet again.

oh, and some modem issues of course (still unresolved and bitter)

1) I had the idea that linux was very compact and can run on a low end machine. WRONG I was. Most setups are full color GUIs which don't really work out on a 16 color video card, and not being able to boot off a CD I had to use floppies which forced me into the video mode setup and bypassed the options to go to text. So I could not really install RH on the 486 because of that. Not all that bad but annoying.

1B) It would not reconize the nics I had in a P133 system, as I was hoping to setup a firewall, or at least a server.

2) this is more recent. I have a server that pretty much runs the whole network at the house and I also use it for php development. When I hit refresh, the script ate all the memory thanks to an accident with a while loop, but instead of just crashing or something, or erroring out, it froze the machine completely I had to power off badly, and I learned the hard way that Ext3 is not as reliable as NTFS when the machine is powered off bad. Most partitions including the OS one got corrupted. had to do a clean install. This, was the worse nightmare ever. I was unsure if I was going to get any of my data back. Luckly I got the data partition back so at least all the recent (less then 24 hours old) SQL backups were available. If I would of lost all partitions I would of been stuck with 1 week year old backups. So you can imagine how much I was panicing during the whole process.

I started with Mandrake 8.2. I bought it at Wal-Mart on an impulse buy. I had no clue as to Linux except what I was reading on the box. I installed Mdk to a second drive that I had laying around. It was a 4.2 gig drive and the install went fine. It set up lilo for a dual boot and I was happily tooling around my new desktop. But, I had a software modem.

This modem was (and still is) a Zoom 3025L. I found that it is supported in Linux and I set out trying to get it to work. I must have downloaded a dozen different rpms for this modem. I tried fixscript and all kinds of stuff in the readme and docs. Nothing was working. I was about to give up.

Then I was reading about source code and their was a source code driver that had to be compiled. I downloaded this one, extracted it, and set about reading some more. I followed the instructions and got errors. It took two days for me and google to figure out what kernel headers are and where to find them. I had no clue that it was a package I could have installed in the beginning. I installed the kernel source rpm and after that I was connected. Yea - I had hit the big time! I was hooked!

Next project I tackled was FlightGear. Too ambitious on my part, because it took two weeks to figure out. But I was flying and crashing. I stuck with Mdk through 9.2, then I found Slackware and I ain't looked back yet.

I still have a lot to learn, but at least i can follow instructions now and find and fix problems a lot easier. But I can say with confidence that I am a master at re-installs! I've had to do enough of 'em!

Another one that just happened to me like 5 minutes ago...

I decided to run an apt-get upgrade on my server... all it did is randomply change/add/delete stuff and hosed my SMTP server, and probably other stuff I'll only notice later. I also got errors that I have files missing, etc.. Funny since something told me I should of did an image of the drive before, as soon as I hit enter.