Pamac hanging on 'Preparing'

Support
1

Hi there, nothing special about my Manjaro install, but pamac has been hanging on ‘Preparing’ any time I install a package, refresh databases, or try an update. It needs a sigstop to kill it. Manual system updates with pacman -Syu work fine and all CLI software installs work fine. Saw some other people reporting this issue in the past, but none of those solutions worked for me. I tried to update the mirrorlist as recommended by one of these topics but that didn’t work.

Any suggestions? Thank you.

2

What solutions have you tried so far besides the mirror update?

3

Did you try pamac from terminal without GUI?

4

All I have tried was to update the mirrorlist than do a full system update, and try to refresh databases. The first didn’t work and the second hangs as well.

No have not tried pamac from terminal. Will try that.

1 Like
5

And share the output here.
Taking care to use the </> code button for formatting.

6

I suspect your issue may be custom AUR package related.

Having AUR updates enabled in Pamac is counter productive - and leads to all kinds fo problems.

Disable updates from AUR in the Add/Remove Software application Pamac’s preferences.

Evaluate what alien packages you have installed

pacman -Qqem
7

I have the following installed:

ghostty-git
python312
reiserfsprogs
rustdesk
trizen

I don’t need ghostty or rustdesk any more, so I removed those. Not sure where reiserfsprogs came from. When I try to enter pamac preferences it hangs on a spinner.

8

You can remove this one as well as reiserfs is deprecated since long and its package has been removed from repositories.

9

I did so, all I have left is python 3.12 and trizen. pamac still doing the same thing.

10

Now, Do you need python 3.12?

$ python --version
Python 3.13.2
11

You could try pactree to check which packages require python312 and trizen
pactree -r trizen
pactree -r python312
and delete what you don’t really need, to possibly reinstall them later.

12

Is the package manager something I could just try reinstalling? I guess use pacman to reinstall pamac?

13

I was about to suggest that. :wink: It’s worth a try.

14

Of course you can reinstall pamac : sudo pacman -S pamac
But what gives pamac install <some package> ?

2 Likes
15

Reinstall didn’t fix it.

16

Can you please reply to the question what the output is if using pamac on command line?

You can either install an application for testing or use pamac update for updating your machine.

2 Likes
17 
$ sudo pamac update
[sudo] password for user: 
Preparing...
Synchronizing package databases...
Resolving dependencies...
Checking inter-conflicts...

To upgrade (1):
  chromium  134.0.6998.88-1  (134.0.6998.35-1)  extra  113.9 MB

Total download size: 113.9 MB
Total installed size: 182.8 kB

Apply transaction ? [y/N] y
Download of chromium (134.0.6998.88-1) started                                                                                                              
Download of chromium (134.0.6998.88-1) finished                                                                                                             
Checking keyring...                                                                                                                                    [1/1]
Checking integrity...                                                                                                                                  [1/1]
Loading packages files...                                                                                                                              [1/1]
Checking file conflicts...                                                                                                                             [1/1]
Checking available disk space...                                                                                                                       [1/1]
==> skipping timeshift-autosnap due skipRsyncAutosnap in /etc/timeshift-autosnap.conf set to TRUE.
Upgrading chromium (134.0.6998.35-1 -> 134.0.6998.88-1)...                                                                                             [1/1]
Running post-transaction hooks...
Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...                                                                                                                         [1/3]
Updating icon theme caches...                                                                                                                          [2/3]
Updating the desktop file MIME type cache...                                                                                                           [3/3]
Transaction successfully finished.

There is nothing abnormal about this that I can see. It runs quick, no hangs.

18

it updated chromium and finished successfully
No “hanging on Preparing” like the title says …

19

Maybe I need to clarify. I’m talking about the window that comes up when you click on the ‘add/remove software’ icon. I thought that was referred to as pamac as well. Sorry if I caused any confusion.

Also, an interesting development. I stopped and disabled my tigervnc session, in case it had something to do with this. I then rebooted the PC. Now I am getting a dialog message saying ‘authentication failed’. Also, now the main window stays on ‘1 pending operation’ but the application doesn’t hang.

20

Personally, I do not use the GUI App (it is called pamac-manager when you start it via terminal),
so I’m not experienced or qualified to comment on any issues you might have with that.
Sorry!

The command line tool (which you used as per the last post) had no issues at all :man_shrugging: is what I was saying.