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I am migrating to a new hard drive, and would like to make the installation as painless as possible...
I believe on my current installation I have a complete and up-to-date cache, and am wondering how I can use these packages during the installation from the LiveCD.
I would like to be able copy the cache to a directory on the USB drive and have the Arch installer use those packages during installation. How do I do this?
I assume I have to mount the drive somewhere, but where exactly? And the packages won't be on the root directory of the device.
EDIT: It appears the output of pacman -Q and ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg are different. I have not cleaned the package cache (other than pacman -Sc). Is there any reason for this? For example the only package listed in the cache with z is zip, but in the query both zip an zlib show up. I'm worried that perhaps some of the base packages aren't there.f
Last edited by egan (2010-01-05 03:51:16)
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1. You can create a local repo.
2. You can copy them over to your newly created /var/cache directory.
To make it more painless you should save a backup of all your installed package info in a text file by querying pacman. Then it's just a matter of pacman -S $(cat list) on the new install.
To know more please read the pacman wiki page.
I assume I have to mount the drive somewhere, but where exactly? And the packages won't be on the root directory of the device.
Anywhere.
It appears the output of pacman -Q and ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg are different. I have not cleaned the package cache (other than pacman -Sc). Is there any reason for this? For example the only package listed in the cache with z is zip, but in the query both zip an zlib show up. I'm worried that perhaps some of the base packages aren't there.
Did you uncomment "KeepInstalled" in pacman.conf before running pacman -Sc ?
Regards
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EDIT: It appears the output of pacman -Q and ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg are different. I have not cleaned the package cache (other than pacman -Sc). Is there any reason for this? For example the only package listed in the cache with z is zip, but in the query both zip an zlib show up. I'm worried that perhaps some of the base packages aren't there.
I'm pretty sure the cache would only have the packages that have been downloaded since you first installed, so anything that hasn't gotten updated since then wouldn't be in your cache. I'm not sure if that's the difference you're seeing, but I do notice in your example zlib hasn't been updated since Dec 2008.
If those are the only things missing, you should have most of the packages in the cache which will still save you a lot of downloading.
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Thanks guys, looks like I have the information I need. All the missing packages are indeed old ones.
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You can just do pacman -U /mnt/oldharddrive/var/cache/pacman/pkg/*.tar.gz, and pacman will add missing dependencies as needed. You'll probably need to -Sy first to avoid conflicts. That should catch most of what you used to have installed. Then diff the pacman -Q outputs from your old and new harddrives to see what you may be missing.
Last edited by tavianator (2010-01-05 03:52:09)
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