I have a fresh install from an ISO I downloaded a couple months ago.
I installed tor, torsocks and tcpdump while offline using packages that I downloaded earlier. I just double-clicked the PACKAGE_NAME-VERSION_NUMBER-ARCH.pkg.tar.zst and a great little GUI installer appeared and it installed the packages wonderfully easily and the softwares themselves work beautifully.
But, now systemd says it’s status is ‘degraded’.
I ran
systemctl --failed
and it points to pkgfile-update.service as the application failing to start, saying pkgfile-update “loads” but doesn’t have any “low” or “high-level” “unit activation state”.
Another post in these forums says to use the following to update:
pkgfile --update
But that seems to require downloading files like community.files from a mirror. Again I don’t have access to the internet yet.
I’ve downloaded these manually but don’t really know what to do with them?
core.files
extra.files
community.files
multilib.files
I understand the above files need to become .db files in /var/lib/pacman/sync/ ?
TL:DR
Is there a proper way to install packages offline?
The problem is that systemd/systemctl isn’t allowing me to perform other operations while its “status: degraded”.
In the systemctl man page, search for “degraded”. All it means is, “The system is operational but one or more units failed.”, but not why. You did the right thing to investigate what service failed. Having said that, “degrade” sounds worse than it is. It depends on what failed and why. You can reset the service and then the status will be “running”. Checkout “reset-failed” on the systemctl man page.
directory content
/var/lib/pacman/
local
packages installed on your system via pacman, pamac, etc.
99.99...% of the time never manipulate.
this is the heart of the software installed on system globally.
sync
community.db
community.files
core.db
core.files
extra.db
extra.files
multilib.db
multilib.files
refresh_timestamp
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/
compressed, archived packages and sig files
The *.files provide quick access to package files via pkgfile or pacman. It answers questions like, “what package owns this file”. Anytime the .db files are updated to reflect the current repository, the .files should be updated.
You can prevent pkgfile-update service from starting by using stop and disable.
Search this forum, offline update is discussed often ( example)
Be very careful, with a rolling release you NEED to update the ENTIRE system on a regular basis. You might be able to install a package here or there, but eventually you’ll end up with a HUGE head ache with dependencies, conflicts.
Everything has to be insync — what is in /var/cache/pacman/pkg and /var/lib/pacman/sync, you cannot pick and choose. I’m a little concerned about, " offline using packages that I downloaded earlier.".
What other operations? What is the specific command that you are executing and what are you seeing?
My bad. The system is indeed working as expected. I was just getting an iptables command wrong. Forgot to add the ‘6’ for ip6tables.
Nice tip! We can mark this as solved.
My bad. The ‘word’ earlier, should have been changed to recently.
Also checked that there were no bugs reported for/between them and checked the signatures, so all good
Will do, thanks!
EDIT: Ah, okay. So the .db files are perhaps more(?) important to download for the offline update and not the .files files. I’m sort of confused as to why the .files files are downloadable when it seems the more important file to download is the db file? Will post when I find success.
Solution option below the post that best solved your issue instead of editing the topic title. 