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  • Arch Failed To Commit Transaction (Invalid or corrupted package)

    Long story short, this error popped up when I was running an update in Manjaro using the Add/Remove Software program. As a result, the in-progress update failed, and I wasn’t able to get past it. Even after restarting my computer, restarting Add/Remove Software, I still ran into the same error. After some research, I discovered that apparently, somewhere along the way, one of my updates had gotten interrupted. (Which makes sense when your two year old son just goes around pushing the hard reset button (conveniently?) located on the front of my tower… or the glowing blue power button on my UPS… you get the idea.) So yeah, there was a solid chance a process or two was interrupted. Because of that interruption, there was a temporary file left in my pacman cache. Removing this incomplete temp file was solved as soon as that file was removed and the update was restarted.

    Solved error with sudo rm /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*.part

    Just as a side note, there is a similar error covered on my blog where Arch fails to build Nettle6

    matt

    January 15, 2021
    Uncategorized
    arch, linux, manjaro, package manager

  • Failed to Build Nettle6

    Hey guys, I was trying to build a copy of Local by Flywheel on Manjaro Linux, but ran into this error… ‘ Failed to build nettle6 ‘

    failed to build nettle6

    nettle6 is a dependency of Local, but after the attempted build of the package, I got the error failed to build nettle6 :

    ==> Verifying source file signatures with gpg...
    nettle-3.4.1.tar.gz ... FAILED (unknown public key F3599FF828C67298)
==> ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified!
Failed to build nettle6

    If you happen to come across this error, just double check the key by running

    gpg --recv-key F3599FF828C67298

    Just plug in the gpg key from the error at the end of your gpg --recv-key call.

    In my case, that didn’t work. The resulting output was:

    ~ >>> gpg --recv-key F3599FF828C67298                                          
gpg: keyserver receive failed: General error
~ >>>

    If you’re like me and the key validation still fails, you can try a different key from another server using the --keyserver flag. For example:

    gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key F3599FF828C67298

    In my case, it shows that the new key was successfully imported.

    ~ >>> gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key F3599FF828C67298   [2]
gpg: key F3599FF828C67298: public key "Niels Möller <[email protected]>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1
~ >>>

    Now, when I run the nettle6 package build again… it works! Hope this helps. There’s a great resource on this on the Manjaro forums.

    Again, this is a very specific error and solution, and it just so happened that I was having trouble with my gpg keys. This may not be the case for everyone, but I hope this article is helpful to you.

    matt

    September 21, 2020
    Linux
    arch, linux, manjaro, package manager

  • Failed to Commit Transaction (Conflicting Files) Manjaro

    How to fix Failed to Commit Transaction (Conflicting Files) Error in Manjaro Linux

    This error is usually thrown after an attempted package upgrade using either pacman, the GUI, or another package manager. Below is an example of the error:

    This can happen with pretty much any package, depending on what else you’ve got installed on your system. Basically, pacman is saying it can’t go through with the upgrade because there are some conflicting files that exist on your machine that is preventing the upgrade from progressing any farther. Here’s what you can do to solve this.

    Step 1

    Check to see which package owns the file in question. You can do this by running pacman -Qo /path/to/the/file. If that prints out the name of a package, then you will have to decide whether or not to uninstall the package with the conflicting package by using sudo pacman -R nameOfThePackage.

    Step 2

    If the file in question is not owned by any package (as was the case for my situation), you can simply delete the file in conflict. You can do this by running sudo rm /path/to/the/file. Once the file has been removed, you’ll need to run the update process again to confirm that all the conflicting files in question have been resolved.

    To find out more about this issue and similar issue when updating packages, feel free to check out the pacman troubleshooting guide on the Manjaro wiki site.

    If you want to use the package manager to install DaVinci Resolve, check out this post

    matt

    May 5, 2020
    General Computing, Linux, Manjaro
    arch, linux, manjaro, package manager, troubleshooting

  • How to Fix Unable to Lock Database Error in Arch Linux

    How to Fix Unable to Lock Database

    When I try to update my machine by running sudo pacman -Syyu I get an error saying it’s unable to lock the database. Below is an example:

    But as you may have noticed, by removing a special database lock file, I was able to solve the issue. You can do this with sudo privileges by running:

    sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck

    The above method is dangerous

    I’ve done this before, and it’s worked perfectly fine with no issues. But the reason the db.lck file exists is to ensure that only one program can run updates at a time. This prevents partial updates, or interrupted updates, or conflicts, or any other problems that can occur when two programs try to do the same update at the same time.

    So before you go deleting your db.lck file like I did, do yourself a favor and make absolute certain that there are no other programs trying to update anything. You can use the lsof command to check what other programs are using the db.lck file. lsof is short for “list open files”.

    The lsof command will either return nothing or a single number. If it returns nothing, that means that no process is currently using that file. If it does return a number, then that is the ID of the process currently using that file. In order to delete the file safely, you’ll need to kill that process first. You can do that by running sudo kill -9 <process_id>

    Hope that helps! Please leave a comment below if you have any questions. You can find more information on using the command line, check out this awesome book called The Linux Command Line. It’s free!

    matt

    April 28, 2020
    General Computing, Linux, Manjaro
    arch, linux, manjaro, package manager, troubleshooting, ubuntu, update

  • How to Remove a PPA via the Command Line

    How to Remove a PPA via the Command Line

    If you’ve used Linux for any amount of time, you’ve probably come across a PPA. A PPA is short for Personal Page Archive. If you’re looking for a specific piece of software not available in the official software store for your distro, you might look into adding a PPA. Most software that is offered via PPA includes the installation instructions to add their PPA and get everything installed. However, not every software includes instructions on how to remove their PPA and uninstall everything. In this tutorial, we’re gonna learn how to remove a PPA via the command line.

    Side Thoughts

    As far as I’ve heard on forums and StackOverflow and pretty much everywhere else, it’s typically not the best idea to install software using a PPA. I did it a few years ago when I was first getting into linux, but I don’t do it at all anymore. Generally speaking, PPAs aren’t the safest thing to be using and I really don’t have much need for them anymore. In fact, on of the biggest reasons I switched to Manjaro a while back was because of the massive AUR (Arch User Repository). There you can find a massive community of Arch users who have created a ton of software and configured it just for Arch. Still getting the hang of it, but so far it’s been amazing.

    Now for the Actual Tutorial

    If you happen to know the exact URL of your PPA, you can remove it by using the --remove flag:

    sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp

    Not that you’d ever remove GIMP! It’s an awesome photo manipulation program and it’s included in official software stores in most distros anyway.

    If you don’t know or can’t remember your exact PPA location, you can browse all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

    ~$ cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
    ~$ ls

    Once you find the PPA you wanna trash, just run:

    ~$ sudo rm nameOfThatPPA.list

    also, if you have a .save file paired with it, just trash it as well.

    ~$ sudo rm nameOfThatPPA.save

    matt

    January 5, 2020
    General Computing, Linux, Ubuntu
    linux, package manager, PPA, ubuntu, update

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 Thess 5:21