[solved] pacman issues, keys

Recently attempted a pacman -Syu and had some of the typical failures of breaking dependencies and so forth, repaired by identifying orphan applications...

# pacman -Qdt

and then removing them...

# pacman -Rs [the package]

However, the system failed a subsequent update attempt, reporting a lack of disk space. Let's check why.

$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
dev 1884252 0 1884252 0% /dev
run 1891812 760 1891052 1% /run
/dev/sda1 27867324 25491112 960636 97% /
tmpfs 1891812 5880 1885932 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1891812 0 1891812 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 1891812 8 1891804 1% /tmp
/dev/sda2 681201384 114146820 532451556 18% /home

So, shit, yah. Not good, 25GB of 27GB used? Let's try the usual suspect /var/pacman/cache.

# du -sh /var/cache/pacman
18G /var/cache/pacman
# pacman -Sc
Packages to keep:
All locally installed packages

Cache directory: /var/cache/pacman/pkg/
:: Do you want to remove all other packages from cache? [Y/n] y
removing old packages from cache...

Database directory: /var/lib/pacman/
:: Do you want to remove unused repositories? [Y/n] y
removing unused sync repositories...
# du -sh /var/cache/pacman
1.5G /var/cache/pacman

Pretty nice to get rid of 16GB of unused shit

install some local package

If you're in this mess, you might also have to CLI mount a USB drive. I first checked which partitions I had on the USB drive. I plugged in the USB and noted it was assigned "/dev/sdg, so I then...

# lsblk /dev/sdg

... and see there's only one partition "sdg1", so...

# mount -t vfat -o rw,users /dev/sdg1 /home

... then when done with copying the files, I umount the device.
Now you have a local package and want to install it using pacman

# pacman -U [package.tgz]

signatures

We'd like pacman to verify signatures, but occasionally, there are error messages if it's been a long time since the update. Often times, I've found that simply reinstalling the keyring works.

# pacman -S archlinux-keyring

/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Occasionally, mirrors go offline so that, if it's been a while since an update, pacman occasionally can't locate the previously enabled mirror. Go into this file and uncomment some other mirror or get the latest available list at the pacman mirrorlist generator.

# pacman -Syy
# pacman -Syu

ffmpeg dependencies

Another potential long period update fail, is a pacman exit due to any of several ffmpeg dependencies. This may look like...

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: ffmpeg2.8: installing libvpx (1.7.0-1) breaks dependency 'libvpx.so=4-64'
:: ffmpeg2.8: removing libx264 breaks dependency 'libx264.so=148-64'
:: ffmpeg2.8: installing x265 (2.8-1) breaks dependency 'libx265.so=146-64'

Fix...

# pacman -Rs vlc

Sometimes, this leads to a second dependency issue with phonon. If so, uninstall phonon, then vlc. Next try to update normally with the -Syu flags. This usually works, so then just re-install vlc after the update.

pacman key failures

Sometimes a pacman update fails due to key errors. All the apps have PGP keys now and sometimes pacman won't update due to some error in that database or so forth. Usual cure

# pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring -

...after which try the more nuclear option

# pacman-key --refresh-keys

There is also a problem that occurs when the fucking keyserver (right, you have to worry about keyservers now) will not have that key, causing an error. This is typically in yay operations.

$ yay -Syu
==> PGP keys need importing:
-> E0C4CDDB8A6B4FDA4F8468E024ADFAAF698F1516, required by: pgadmin3
==> Import? [Y/n] y
:: Importing keys with gpg......
gpg: keyserver receive failed: General error
==> Error: Problem importing keys

And it's at this point that a person has to install it manually. The Arch Linux key list

yay issues

Sometimes after an update, you want to use yay....

$ yay -Syu
yay: error while loading shared libraries: libalpm.so.12: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This page explains all the steps but, in short...

# pacman -Rs yay
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
$ cd yay
$ makepkg -si

The "i" flag prompts an install when complete (uses pacman -U), so just enter your password when requested. Yay should work thereafter. You can check the version with the "--version" flag. To get rid of the build directory without a MILLION confirmations...

$ rm -rI