3.9 KiB
Package Managers
Package managers are important programs to get software onto your system.
Arch Linux: Pacman and Yay
In Arch Linux there are 2 main types of package managers. The first is pacman, the default package manager.
For the second type there are many different managers to chose from. Those managers are handling for the Arch User Repositories (AUR). In this article yay is used as the go to AUR manager. yay is also a wrapper for pacman so yay can be used instead of pacman to install and update both AUR and main repository programs. It features the same syntax.
Usage
This section addresses various usages of the arch linux package managers.
Manual Installation of a PKGBUILD File
A PKGBUILD file is a shell script that contains the installation
information that is required by the Arch Linux.
Using the makepkg command it can be installed like the following command shows.
makepkg -sirc
Afterwards it is installed on the system and can be further managed (especially uninstalled) by the Pacman package manager.
Installing an AUR Program with a Specific Version
The installation of a specific version of an AUR program can be easily achieved.
For this navigate to the AUR page of the program to install.
On the right-hand side click on View Changes and select the version you want to install in the
commit list.
Next to download a .tar.gz file can be downloaded which includes a PKGBUILD file.
Afterwards it needs to be uncompressed.
Clear Cache
The cache of all packages except the one installed can be deleted by running the following command.
pacman -Sc
Since yay mirrors the usage of pacman it can be used the same way and will clean both caches.
yay -Sc
Enabling multilib
multilib is a repository that contains 32-bit software and libraries.
By default it is not enabled.
To enable it search and uncomment the following lines in the file /etc/pacman.conf.
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Troubleshooting
This section addresses various uses of the pacman and yay package managers.
Update Mirrorlist
After a while not updating the system it is possible for the mirrorlist to be outdated. This can be fixed by updating it with the following command:
curl -o /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist https://archlinux.org/mirrorlist/all/
Troubleshooting
This section addresses various errors that can happen when using the package managers yay and pacman.
Error While Importing Keys
Both yay and pacman use GPG keys.
It is possible that it runs into errors when importing new keys.
If this happens you should try to restart the GPG key server
as explained in the GPG entry.
Unknown Public Key
If the error ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified!, you
have to manually receive the key and trust it.
This can be done as explained in the GPG entry.
The identifier of the key usually gets gets printed in the line above the error looking like
FAILED (unknown public key <KEYID>).
Error During Updating is marginal trust
If the error [...] Key [...] is marginal trust (also of unknown trust) occurs while updating
the system, it can be fixed by running the following commands and then restarting
the update process of the package manager.
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring
pacman-key --populate archlinux
pacman-key --refresh-keys
Error During Updating the following untracked working tree files would be overwritten
The error the following untracked working tree files would be overwritten can happen when the
cache features a changed version of the files used by yay to update the package.
This can easily be fixed by removing the cache of the corresponding package.