Arch Linux

madra-rua

Member

Registered: 2010-08-20

Posts: 2

Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

Hi - sorry if the answer to this is blindingly obvious.  I'll make the excuse that I'm totally brain-dead after a day of learning basic Arch.  I'm a Ubuntu user who's totally new to messing with conf files & stuff, and I've just spent the last (n+1) hours installing Arch on my laptop and trying to get most things to work.  (not quite there yet)

In Ubuntu, there was the synaptic package manager, which was a nice graphical way of browsing what packages were available and installing those that looked interesting.

Is there anything similar for pacman?  I've been installing stuff via pacman all day, but only stuff that the how-to files told me existed.

How can I browse, and just see what's available?  I googled a couple of pacman GUIs, but they seemed a bit out of date and abandoned.

Thanks!

loafer

Member

From: the pub

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 1,772

Re: Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

Hello mate and welcome,

you can search for packages here easily:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/

Plus, look at the various categories in the Wiki.

Last edited by loafer (2010-08-20 19:34:00)

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lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

You can use pacman -Ss or the package search on archlinux.org to search for packages using keywords.

splittercode

Member

From: WI, USA

Registered: 2010-03-16

Posts: 203

Re: Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

All the info you need can be found in the pacman entry of the arch wiki or 'man pacman'.

Anyway, the answer to your question is 'pacman -Ss foo'

kcirick

Member

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 364

Re: Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

I guess adhering to Arch's slogan of "keep it simple", many people installs applications that they need, they won't install because "it looks interesting". Sometimes you see cool screenshots that looks interesting and you want to try it out, then it's different because you know what it does and how it's used.

If you have a specific application in mind but don't know the exact name, you can try something like

pacman -Ss package

Edit: Forgot the second half of OP's question. There is a GUI interface to pacman, but it doesn't get a lot of attention. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pac … _Frontends

Last edited by kcirick (2010-08-20 19:41:45)

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karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 59#p805359

Gtkpacman actually works very well at what it does. The best way to use it is to look up applications. then # pacman -S whatever, to install.

Edit: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 68#p811168

Last edited by karol (2010-08-20 19:44:41)

madra-rua

Member

Registered: 2010-08-20

Posts: 2

Re: Utter newbie - How do I find out what's available via Pacman?

Thanks for the helpful replies everyone.  I'm just about to settle down to another day of 'learning Arch'.  Last night I (finally) got wireless working OK, then got compiz-fusion up and running.  Today I plan to install more of the software I can't do without, and learn a bit more of day-to-day Arch maintenance (like this pacman -Syu thingie!)

Thanks again!