Posted inInformation Technology

Updating CachyOS – and others

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

CachyOS uses pacman and paru under the hood so this will work for any linux distro using those. Too many Linux distros don’t include an obvious update method that updates both repo and “other” installed software in one shot. By default CachyOS does not install flatpak. They discourage it. (You really want to avoid any distro supporting snaps!) Yes, I’ve written about CachyOS before on this blog.

Personally, I prefer flatpak over docker type containers for desktop use. Having said that, on my CachyOS machines I try to adhere to the AUR philosopy. I used to love AppImage, even created one for RedDiamond, but some distros have moved to a newer version of Fuse so you have to do some dancing to get AppImages to work on them. Basically you have to install Fuse2 because Fuse3 doesn’t work with AppImages currently.

Flatpaks have a philosophy similar to official distro repos. The package should be fluid and continually updated. AppImages on the other hand have the philosophy of “I need a specific version of this tool and I can’t risk the OS changing it on me.” Stable tools are important. LibreOffice is as stable as a soap bubble. I have multiple books written with it that cannot be edited using current version. Gotta love an “unattended upgrade” that forces a new LO on you which happens to be completely incompatible with your current document.

Note: This assumes you are running a real Linux distro that has a root account. If su – doesn’t allow you to login, you need a better distro.

CachyOS

Open a terminal. Type

su -

enter your root password then type

nano update_all.sh

Technically the following is overkill. Technically Paru is a wrapper around pacman and AUR, but anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

pacman -Syu 
paru -Sua

Save and exit. Now make it executable.

chmod +x update_all.sh

Now you can run it anytime you want to update your system. 

su -
./update_all.sh

Apt users

Might as well round this out. For Apt users your update_all.sh will contain

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
flatpak update

If you aren’t using flatpak then you can leave that line off.

One of the main reasons I prefer flatpak over docker for desktop use is updating docker can be involved. While I have an AppImage for RedDiamond, most app images can’t be updated unless a developer does a lot of work.

PCLinuxOS users

Really, any RPM based distro using dnf should have update_all.sh containing this:

dnf update
flatpak update

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.