Frugalware comes with Pacman-G2 package manager. Pacman-G2 is a fork of thenot-yet-released cvs version of the complete rewrite of pacman-g1 by AurelienForet (the old monolithic pacman-g1 is written by Judd Vinet). See theREADME fordetails. If you want to do anything with packages, you’ll always have to usethepacman-g2 command. Here are some basic actions withpacman-g2:
Actions usually used with remote installation from an FTP server:
# pacman-g2 -Sy
Updates the package database. Before searching for packages or installingthem from an FTP server, you will have to use this command.
# pacman-g2 -Su
Upgrades all packages that are currently installed but a newer version ofthe package is available on the FTP server.
# pacman-g2 -Syu
The combination of the above two, that is the command most users use daily.
$ pacman-g2 -Sup
Prints the URL of all packages that pacman-g2 should download. This way youcan download the packages anywhere and then just copy them to/var/cache/pacman/pkg. This is very useful if you have limited bandwidthat your computer, but you can access high bandwidth elsewhere.
# pacman-g2 -S sendmail
Installs sendmail with all of its dependencies from the FTP server.If it conflicts with any package, you will be asked if pacman-g2 isallowed to remove them.
$ pacman-g2 -Ss perl
Searches in the package database (on the FTP server). This examplewill probably display the perl package and all perl modules.Regular expression based search is also supported.
Of course, you can treat packages as normal files, and you canmanually add/remove/etc them. Here are some examples:
# pacman-g2 -U zsh-4.2.1-1.fpm
Adds (or if it’s already installed, upgrades) the zsh package,which is located in the current directory.
# pacman-g2 -R qt
Removes the qt package.
$ pacman-g2 -Qs perl
Shows every installed packages whose name contains the string perl.
Generally, if you want to turn off checking for conflicting files,you should use the -f parameter, and if you want to turn off alldependency checking, you should use the -d switch.
$ pacman-g2 -h
This displays all the switches we discussed above, and a lot more.Once again, these are only the basics.You can also use pacman-g2 -Sh or similar to get help on a particular task.
Note | Full documentation for pacman-g2 can be reached by issuingman pacman-g2. |
For those who are familiar with the apt package management tool,here is a quick cross-reference.
| Action | Apt command | Pacman-G2 command |
|---|---|---|
Refresh the package database: | apt-get update | pacman-g2 -Sy |
Upgrade currently installed packages: | apt-get upgrade | pacman-g2 -Su |
Install a new package: | apt-get install foo | pacman-g2 -S foo |
Remove a package: | apt-get remove foo | pacman-g2 -Rc foo |
Search in the full package database: | apt-cache search foo | pacman-g2 -Ss foo |
Install a package from a file: | dpkg -i foo.deb | pacman-g2 -A foo.fpm |
Clean the package cache: | apt-get clean | pacman-g2 -Sc |
