Getting pacman to install all packages?

Gremlin022 · 07-09-2014, 11:54 AM

Hi,

Arch newbie here. I'm at the pacman phase of the install and have a question. How do I get pacman to install all packages? It's an experimental system so I don't mind having all packages available on my system. I'm not sure what packages to even look for, so I might as well install all of them.

evo2 · 07-09-2014, 08:58 PM

Hi,

it's not possible to do this - some of the packages will conflict with each other.

Evo2.

frankbell · 07-09-2014, 09:00 PM

Arch has a lot of packages in its repos. If you tell pacman to install "all" packages, you are likely to rapidly run out of HDD space. It's been a while since I played with Arch, but, as I recall, Arch has a pretty good article on what you need to set up a fully functional system after the base install.

The Arch wiki has a good article on using pacman. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/pacman

syg00 · 07-09-2014, 09:10 PM

Not to mention unnecessarily trashing the servers for no good reason is just bad etiquette, and potentially hurts everyone else.

basica · 07-10-2014, 02:08 AM

If you're not sure what packages to look for, then I don't think Arch is for you at this point in time. They have a good install guide, and they walk you through setting up any one of several desktop environments as well as drivers for your video cards. If you find those guides too difficult, you should probably test the waters more in something like Ubuntu or Mint and read some of the guides on TLDP.org before going onto more hands on distros like Arch.

Gremlin022 · 07-10-2014, 06:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by basica

If you're not sure what packages to look for, then I don't think Arch is for you at this point in time. They have a good install guide, and they walk you through setting up any one of several desktop environments as well as drivers for your video cards. If you find those guides too difficult, you should probably test the waters more in something like Ubuntu or Mint and read some of the guides on TLDP.org before going onto more hands on distros like Arch.

Yeah, I don't think Arch is for me, yet. The step-by-step guides are great but there's just too much information and it's intimidating. The system ended up having a kernel panic during the pacman stage of the install, so I'm moving on to Linux Mint or something like it first.

frankbell · 07-10-2014, 07:48 PM

If your computer has enough RAMs, once you are comfortable with Mint, you could always try to build Arch in a virtual machine. VMs are a great learning tool; if you trash one, you can just delete and start over.