Well, an update.
When I left this discussion, it had taken what I would describe diplomatically as an
...unhelpful turn. People were either repeatedly insisting that I "just
reinstall" despite my explanations why this was not practical; lecturing me about
panic psychology and/or their opinions on Windows; engaged in inscrutable, arbitrary,
highly technical tangents seemingly for their own gratification; or outright attacking me
as a 'troll' for even having a problem in the first place.
Consequently, I gave up, and called the co-ordinator on Monday, resigned to probably
having to withdraw from the course.
Fortunately (or, unfortunately?) I was not alone. A number of other prospective students
had called in states of distress (apparently many also having been lured onto Fedora
...), and thus I was put in touch with one of the course tutors.
I copied my first post through to him, and in about 10 minutes and two emails of plain,
easy language, it was fixed. I didn't write down the exact commands as I was otherwise
focused, but I do recall that we had to open the 'crypt tab' on the encrypted
drive first, get the volumes name, then close it and re-open again with crypt setup but
using this name. this seemed to resolve the error message I was having, and everything
went smoothly from there, re-installing grub then initramfs.
The fact that this was so easy and close to my original steps, makes me suspicious that
people here knew all along, but were rather choosing to withhold information or present it
cryptically to prove some kindof of 'point', as if I deserve to be punished for
not knowing enough answer a question before I even ask it. The tutor himself alluded to
this in his email:
"They're very much like Arch in this way - a whole lot of ego tied up in
"their" software, and the tone of your thread is pretty typical of them. mailing
lists tend to be particularly bad, a lot of self-appointed 'senior' users who
gatekeep pretty hard.
There's been a pretty sus push lately on various socials etc about how 'Fedora is
the new Ubuntu' but honestly we want neither being used by students, for different
reasons (i pushed for distributing standardized environments but....).
Neither are really stable and are really just enterprises using the public for free beta
testing. fedora esp isn't well tested and is not fit at all for daily driving by
average/new users (as we're seeing!) but also the community is absolutely not one we
want students having to engage with. ever.
[Redacted] and I'll probably touch on this in the first tute - looks like the first
week is just going to be setting up environments anyway so we'll just work that into
the CLO's but either way we'll get you sorted "
So - in the end, I *did* go with a fresh installation - Debian! But to perhaps fix what is
clearly a much larger, different problem.
I'm fairly sure this won't go down well, but that itself is rather the issue here.
Nonetheless, I do certainly want to close this record in case anyone else comes looking
to solve a similar problem, but also making it clear the impact your collective conduct
has had, whether you can admit it or not.
I won't say 'thanks' but I will say: You've certainly all left an
impression.