Adapted from: https://yacs-rcos.github.io/

As you can tell from the title, progress for me has been rocky recently.

In order to even begin working on YACS, I had to install Docker. Simple, right? Not when your Linux distribution (Mint) makes it nearly impossible to install Docker. After no luck with attempting to install Docker on Mint, I had to back up everything on my Mint partition before wiping it entirely to switch to Ubuntu, a much more Docker-friendly distribution.

Usually, an Ubuntu install is relatively painless if you know what you’re doing. But mess one thing up, and it easily becomes very painful. This was my case, as I forgot to actually burn the .iso I put on the USB drive I was using! I didn’t even realize it until wiping my Mint partition, rebooting, and staring into the eyes of the Devil himself, better known as grub rescue.

Grub rescue is essentially a simplified version of bash terminal. Usually, you can get back into your Linux partition by following this guide. None of these suggestions worked.

That was when I realized: I didn’t burn the ISO. My initial solution was to boot into my Windows partition, burn the ISO, then get Ubuntu up and running. The only problem was I couldn’t get into my Windows partition, so I asked around for a Windows 8 repair disk. After no luck with the Windows 8 repair disk, I found a friend who has several spare USB drives with bootable Linux images. I plugged in the bootable drive, installed Ubuntu, and I finally had a working Linux distro!

I did have to do a LOT of work to get YACS itself working, but changing a few DNS servers in a JSON file is nothing when you nearly bricked your computer to get one package.

After spending 3 weeks getting Docker working, then another week getting YACS working, then another week trying to figure out the codebase, I finally made my first contribution to YACS!

Now, when you refresh the page, a randomly generated flavortext will show on the footer instead of the usual “A Red-Hat supported RCOS project”, and the word RCOS links to rcos.io.

Non-developers will easily be baffled as to how I sacrificed five weeks and an entire operating system for a small piece of text to display at the bottom of a page. Problems like these, however, are a rite of passage for any software developer. Had I not made such a disastrous mistake even putting Mint on my computer, I wouldn’t know how insecure and unsupported Mint actually is. Needless to say, I’m a lot more patient with minor errors now.