A couple of questions about Manjaro and Linux

Hi,

I recently had to reinstall Windows 10 on my dual-boot GPT+UEFI system that primarily uses Manjaro.

I ended up restoring Manjaro from backup in such a [mistaken] way that there are now two versions of each package in /var/cache/pacman/pkg.

Q1: Is it safe to delete /var/cache/pacman/pkg/* ?

With all the EFI’s (rEFInd, Windows 10, Linux, at times even FreeBSD) in my ESP, my ESP usage never goes beyond 30 MB in df -h. I was earlier following the Linux recommendation of 512 MB ESP (vfat). In the recent reinstall+restore, I just used a 128 MB ESP (msdos/fat16). And the system works damn well.

Q2: Why does Linux recommend 512 MB vfat ESP when 64 MB (max 128 MB) is a more reasonable value ? And why vfat when fat16/msdos works equally well ?

Thanks for any inputs,
Manish Jain

Those are probably different versions of the packages. It is safe to delete this, but I would recommend doing it with the command… :arrow_down:

sudo paccache -rvk0

I’m not sure, but I think the recommendation for vfat and 512 MiB is so as to make it future-proof. Microsoft in turn recommends 260 MiB. :man_shrugging:

Future-proof but current-wastage. Imagine allotting 512 MB of an NVME SSD for what should be a 64 MB partition. I am speaking the dollars involved here.

If you don’t install multiple OS then suite yourself :smiley: don’t waste space.
I recently read a thread where the guy had his 300MB one full and needed cleaning, so each user have different usage.

PS: I have 10MB/300MB used, on my NVME, I don’t really care to waste 250MB+

Tx for reply. But for the guys like in that thread, even a 1 GB ESP would not suffice because they keep filling it up with crap.

I am primarily a FreeBSD ex-user and switched to Manjaro a year back. (The Windows 10 installation just keeps customer support of hardware vendors happy, and almost never gets booted.) Till recently, I had 3 operating systems (Manjaro + FreeBSD + Windows 10) installed - all GPT+UEFI. The ESP in addition hosts rEFInd always (a permanent fixture). Even with three OS’es + rEFInd, ESP usage is limited to under 32 MB. So I do think the standard Linux recommendation for 512 MB is sheer wastage. I am of the humble opinion that a filesystem that is not at least 30% used is occupying unnecessary disk space.

It is the same situation why Linux swap recommendation had to be changed from 2xRAM to 1xRAM - disk space wastage.

On my side I don’t use SWAP :smiley: so 0 wastage.

Nice to know :slight_smile:

For me SWAP is a real waste of space, if you have enough RAM. Sure in case of problem you can full the RAM and crash the system maybe. Never happened yet.

Thanks for that paccache command, Aragorn.

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Hi,

I have, after the Manjaro restore, run into a serious problem because of my mistaken approach to backup/restore.

Whenever I try to install a package, I get the following error message:
<<
(3/4) Fixing hardcoded icons…

You’re running an out of date version of
the script. Please download the latest
verison from the GitHub page or update
via your package manager. If you continue
without updating you may run into problems.
Please answer [e]xit or [c]ontinue
Please answer [e]xit or [c]ontinue
Please answer [e]xit or [c]ontinue

The line “Please answer [e]xit or [c]ontinue” continues endlessly filling up the screen.

I have to Ctrl+C to get through the message.

This issue was first reported in an unrelated thread by me:

Now I realize that the problem should have been reported here on this thread itself.

Which is the script which could be outdated and how to stop these error messages ?

Thanks for any inputs.

That is most likely because you are using Grub as bootloader, which finds the rest of the needed files to boot from your install partition.

The ESP is a special partition type that is used by your UEFI BIOS to boot your operating system(s), this partition is defined to be FAT32 (vfat in linux) in the UEFI Specifications IIRC.

The 512MiB size was just a rule of thumb (aka suggestion only) to have enough space on the ESP partition for the kernel and ramdisk images used by the Linux distro’s.
I personally use a 1GiB one because i tend to have many other stuff there also like EFI-Shell etc…

You could even choose to not have an ESP at all on your HD and put your ESP with bootloader plus its necessary files on an bootable USB-Stick :wink:

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