How many problems do we need to complete a tutorial

So, for the discipline of MAC0470 (Free Software Development), I was supposed to follow these first tutorials:

• Use QEMU and libvirt to setup a Linux kernel test environment
• Build the Linux kernel for ARM
• Introduction to kernel build configuration and modules

And I had several particular struggles with the first and second tutorial. Which drew me back for several times.

In this blog post, I will relate my experience while completing the tutorials and how I managed (or not) to go over them.

During this phase of the tutorials I faced two major issues: my laptop not being able to keep up with my necessities and way too many new concepts to apply during each step.

Technical limitation

During this phase, I faced the few errors:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: The package zoom needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it.

dpkg: error processing package zoom (--remove):
 package is in a very bad inconsistent state; you should
 reinstall it before attempting a removal

GPG error: file:/var/cuda-repo-10-2-local-10.2.89-440.33.01 Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY F60F4B3D7FA2AF80

They all made me unable to finish the tutorials on time, or even finishing them.

Especially when we aimed to run the the qemu virtual machine with the debian ISO, my laptop constantly deleted my configs and everytime that I restarted my laptop. Consequently, I had to rerun the entire booting flow for the first time installation of debian everytime I needed to use it, so, in the end, I could not do the linux kernel coding contributions on my machine and had to share with my colleagues.

Now, after configuring the system we were able to move on to our first FLOSS contribution :)

See you on the next post!