How to install applications in Arch Linux with pacman

You now have a complete Arch Linux system. In this article, I am going to talk about some basics of software management (installation and removal, and system maintenance.

You must always update repositories before installing any package:

sudo pacman –Sy

The following command updates the repositories and runs system updates:

sudo pacman –Syu

To install a package:

pacman –S package_name

Example

pacman –S gimp

If you want to install multiple packages from the same group, there is an easy and simpler way out. Let’s say we want to install several Virtualbox packages. Usually, you will have to list out each of these packages:

sudo pacman -S virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-dkms      virtualbox-guest-modules-lts virtualbox-guest-iso virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-modules virtualbox-guest-utils-nox

But you can make it easier by using this pattern:

sudo pacman -S virtualbox-guest-{dkms,iso,modules,dkms,utils}

Easy peasy.

Optimize Pacman: Once in awhile you need to optimize pacman:

sudo pacman-optimize

Removing packages: To remove a package without touching its repositories:

pacman –R package_name

To remove a package and its dependencies:

pacman –Rns

(If these dependencies are required by other packages, pacman will show error.) If you do want to remove a package with all those packages that rely on these dependencies:

pacman -Rsc package_name

You need to be extra careful before running this command as it can remove a lot of needed packages and break your system. If you want to remove a package that is required by another package without removing the dependent package, use this command:

pacman -Rdd package_name

Keep it clean. Pacman saves the downloaded packages in ‘/var/cache/pacman/pkg’ directory. Once in awhile you need to clean it up to removed the older or uninstalled packages:

pacman -Sc

If you think that you many need to rollback to older package then you can run ‘paccache –r’ command that purges all cached version of packages leaving only 3 most recent version of packages. That’s pretty much all that you need to know to get started with Arch Linux.