Reflector not found

Hi I wanted to use reflector to make sure I always have the fastest mirrors available to me. but when I do sudo pacman -S reflector

this is what I get:

error: target not found: refelctor

I have AUR enabled and everything is up to date and synced.

does Manjaro not support reflector? I don’t know if this is e DE question I’m guessing it probably not, but I could not figure out any other place to ask this question.

thank you for your help

1 Like

You should use pacman-mirrors on Manjaro. It is already preinstalled on your system.

For example, I always do sudo pacman-mirrors -f 5 before every update to rank the 5 fastest mirrors

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Pacman-mirrors

We don’t use reflector in Manjaro. And Arch doesn’t use pacman-mirrors.

7 Likes

Just 2 additional remarks, pacman as a package manager is (directly) irrelevant to the AUR, here and in every distro based on Arch. And Manjaro is not “just Arch but installed with Calamares + theming” so that pacman would fetch Arch packages but:

Although Manjaro is very close to Arch Linux and mostly compatible —being based on Arch Linux itself— it is not possible to access their official repositories for use in Manjaro.

Instead, Manjaro uses its own repositories in order to ensure that any software packages that are accessible, such as system updates and applications, have been fully tested to be compatible and stable before release.

(Taken from the AUR wiki)

2 Likes

also, i think you made a typo

1 Like

Thank y’all for all of the info, this has got to be the best forum I have ever been on!
I could of sworn that I used reflector on the first install I ever tried on Manjaro, but I must just be remembering wrong.

although it (reflector) would be a nice package to have available
as it can take care of refreshing the mirror lists periodically, automatically
with user specified preferences
… instead of having to do it manually when you find out
(the hard way, when encountering an error)
that the current mirror list isn’t valid anymore for some reason

is pacman-mirrors able to run as a systemd service
or can it be configured to run automatically before any install or update action is requested by a user?

You can make a service that runs pacman-mirrors periodically or every time you boot your computer if you want

You can make an alias of something like:

alias update="sudo pacman-mirrors -f 5 && sudo pacman -Syyu"

Of course one can create a service to run it periodically if wanted.
New users wouldn’t even know if or why they would want it - much less know how to do that, though.

Of course one can make an alias.
… new users … the same stuff again …

But then again:
reflector also has to be installed explicitly - and correctly configured.

in the end: same difference …

It’s just a pity that it can’t be installed (easily) in Manjaro.


New users use actually “Add/Remove Software” == pamac GUI, there you can very comfortably & easily click *“Refresh databases mirrors”

A new Manjaro user has nothing to look around in “reflector”, it’s nowhere mentioned in the Installation manual or the wiki and server refresh is actually… not needed under normal circumstances.

I know.
… if they recognize the possible importance to do that when an error such as a failed download due to an unreachable or not up to date mirror is encountered …

it would just be a useful too to have
as I said - or tried to say

well as I said, under normal circumstances this isn’t even needed, and if so pacman-mirrors is sufficiently documented in the manual and in the wiki.

of course pacman-mirrors is sufficient

That was not my point.

reflector is not installable in Manjaro - as it is in Arch, where it is in the community repo

It’s not even an option - that is what I found a bit sad.

I don’t really see the point here, as it’s specific for Arch, as pacman-mirrors is only in Manjaro.
Anyway you can still make an alias reflector=pacman-mirrors in your bashrc/zshrc.

To rank the fastest mirror in 5 random ones.

It already is, from Pamac:

[omano@omano-nvme ~]$ systemctl list-unit-files | grep mirror
pamac-mirrorlist.service                   static          -            
pamac-mirrorlist.timer                     enabled         disabled     

The timer is a little bit long though, it triggers every week.

5 Likes

Thanks!
So there IS a true alternative to reflector.
Good!

This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.