How to use the “pacman” package manager.

As you may know, Furreto Linux uses the pacman package manager in order to manage the packages in the system, its way of doing the thing is via the terminal.

Furreto Linux comes with an in-built graphical app that uses the pacman manager in a more user-friendly way, but it’s missing lot of functionalities that you could use by using pacman itself, so, here’s a quick guide and explanation on pacman

What is “pacman”?

Pacman (not the videogame) is the default package manager used in Arch Linux, Furreto Linux uses this package manager as it is an Arch-based Linux system.

So, how does all of this work?

Pacman uses bunch of arguments in order to do certain actions, we’ll cover all of these arguments and how they’re used.

• Installing an application/package: sudo pacman -S (package) this command will install the package specified.
• Updating an application/package: sudo pacman -Sy (package) this command will update the repositories and update the package specified
• Updating the entire system: sudo pacman -Syu this command will update the entire system. It will look for the new packages, update the repos and finally, update all packages installed on the system. It is recommended to run this command at least once in a week.
• Fetching information about a certain package: pacman -Q (package) this command will give info about the version of the package you specified

There are more arguments you can add to these commands, here’s a list of them:

• --noconfirm: This argument, if added at the end of the command, it will skip the confirmation whether you’d like to install the package or not
• --force: This argument will force the installation/update of a package
• --overwrite "*": This argument will overwrite all files from a package with the new ones you’ll download, for example, let’s say you have corrupted files of the Wine package, you can reinstall Wine and by specifing this argument, you’ll overwrite all the Wine files that are broken

These are the basics of the pacman package manager. Of course there’s more that you can do with this package manager, but for now this is the basics of it, and this is what you should know if you’d like to have a healthy Furreto Linux system. You can read more information about the pacman package manager at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman ^^