Working through laptop repairs at a cafe

Last week I planned a small coworking session with friends at a restaurant.
I run Omarchy on my laptop (with Hyprland), and at home I usually work only with my external monitor.
So, in my infinite wisdom, I disabled the laptop screen in ~/.config/hyprland/monitors.conf.
At home it looked like a great fucking idea.

☕ The setup

At the restaurant, life was good. I had a latte, then a flat white, and even ordered a slice of carrot cake (highly recommended).
Then I opened my laptop to start working.

The screen stayed black.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just rent a monitor.
Five minutes later: no luck, the shop said no.

So I tried Google, ChatGPT, random searches — nothing worked. I was about to give up and just watch my friends type on their glowing screens when one of them said:

“Can I try?”

🖥️ The emergency shell

In five minutes he had managed to enter the emergency shell (just by smashing Ctrl+C during boot).
From there, I finally had hope.

Here’s what we did, step by step:

  • Decrypted the disk with cryptsetup (because my home partition is encrypted).
  • Mounted the disk and found the Hyprland config.
  • Edited the file (no nano, but luckily vi was available).
  • Removed the line that disabled the laptop monitor.
  • Saved, rebooted… and it worked.

It felt like being back in college, fighting with Wi-Fi drivers for hours — frustrating but oddly fun.

🍲 Happy ending

After fixing the issue, I shut down the laptop, enjoyed the rest of the remote day, and ended up at a vegetarian buffet with friends.
A chaotic afternoon turned into a pretty good story (and a learning session).

💡 Thoughts / Lessons

  • Learned how to access the emergency shell (Ctrl+C during boot).
  • Confirmed that cryptsetup is the tool for decrypting LUKS partitions.
  • Emergency shell doesn’t have all your usual tools, but vi is almost always there.
  • Linux troubleshooting is always try → fail → learn. It’s frustrating, but that’s how you grow.
  • And of course: “If it doesn’t work, you forgot to compile the kernel.” (old Linux joke).

🛠️ Technical Notes: Editing a Config in Emergency Shell

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# Check partitions
cat /proc/partitions

# Example: open encrypted device
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 cryptroot
# (enter passphrase)

# Mount the device
mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt

# Navigate and edit the config
vi /mnt/home/<your-user>/.config/hypr/monitors.conf

# Remove the line disabling the monitor, e.g.:
# monitor=eDP-1,disable

# Save and reboot