Arch Linux

slavik262

Member

From: WA, USA

Registered: 2012-07-12

Posts: 46

Website

Safe to run pacman -Syu inside X?

Before arriving here at Arch, I used Aptosid, a distro based on Debian Unstable. The Aptosid user manuals highly recommended logging out of X and dropping to runlevel 3 (X off) before upgrading packages. I would assume this was done so that if the upgrade process took down X or if X crashed, the upgrades wouldn't be interrupted.

In Arch, is it safe to upgrade packages with pacman from within your X environment?

D4ve

Member

Registered: 2012-08-02

Posts: 209

Re: Safe to run pacman -Syu inside X?

Yes, why not?

Only if you update your graphics card driver or the xserver i would switch to runlevel 3.

Shark

Member

From: /dev/zero

Registered: 2011-02-28

Posts: 686

Re: Safe to run pacman -Syu inside X?

Hm, good point. Never thought of it. I think it would suffice to just change console to, for example, tty1 and then do the upgrade, i think.

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jjacky

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Registered: 2011-11-09

Posts: 347

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Re: Safe to run pacman -Syu inside X?

Yes. pacman will only update your system, but it won't stop/restart anything. So even if e.g. xorg-server is updated, X will not be stop or restarted, it's up to you to do so. Just like you should reboot after a kernel update, but pacman will not do anything other than the actual update.

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DSpider

Member

From: Romania

Registered: 2009-08-23

Posts: 2,273

Re: Safe to run pacman -Syu inside X?

99% of the time I am updating my system from X, using Guake.

The other 1% is either from a different terminal, from a TTY or from SSH.

I've been doing this for years, so yes, I consider it to be safe.

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Citanul

Member

Registered: 2012-02-04

Posts: 6

Website

Re: Safe to run pacman -Syu inside X?

I've updated my graphic drivers and the X server (and ran pacman -Syu) while running X countless times and haven't had any problems. Don't worry about it.
I even removed glibc and the whole /lib once and my workspaces and all my open applications still worked but I couldn't launch anything.