Pacman is the package management tool that comes with Arch Linux.

It is very important to change the progress bar to look like Pacman eating dots. You do this by editing /etc/pacman.conf, adding the line 'ILoveCandy' to the [options] > # Misc options section. Make sure you have colour enabled too.

I'll leave out the basics like -Syu, -S, -Ss and -Rsn¹⁾); here're some ones I don't use as much / forget, but are real useful.

-S [group name]-{[name1],name2],[etc]}

-Qs

-Ql

-Qo [/path/to/file_name]

Q does stuff on installed packages, you can replace with F to do the same actions on stuff you haven't installed.

I also have an alias for my helper, so I type pact -[flags] to do stuff.

Errors like

:: [package name] package(s) failed to install.
:: ensure package version does not mismatch between .SRCINFO and PKGBUILD
:: ensure package name has a VCS suffix if this is a devel package

Are are pacaur problem, and can get gotten round by installing manually, or by using another helper

trizen and yay seem to be the helpers to go for now.

Can convert a .deb package into a PKGBUILD with one tool. Real simple to use.

Usage:

1. # debtap -u when you first run it to get the database up to date
2. $ debtap -p [deb file] to make the PKGBUILD

• helixarch/debtap
• debtap

• deb2targz

To clear Pacman's cache pacman -Sc — you can use paccache -rk 2 to delete everything except the last two versions of a package, which is a good idea. paccache -ruk0 will remove everything for packages that are no longer installed.

To find orphan packages pacman -Qdt

Just ran into a little problem where a disk error took out a bit of my pacman database.

This was giving me an error about a desc file every time I ran pacman, and blocking some parts of the process. using –force to reinstall the package didn't help, and I also was unable to remove it.

Thanks to this post I solved it by deleting the packages directory in /var/lib/pacman/local, and reinstalled the database only with pacman -U –dbonly [package].pkg.tar.xz

• Makepkg
  • Makepkg#Improving_compile_times
  • Makepkg#Utilizing_multiple_cores_on_compression