System thinks that things are installed that aren't

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1

OK, there’s a long path to get to this point, but I’ll try to keep it brief.

Yesterday I was surprised by a failed update, which tried to install kernel 5.10 and NVIDIA driver 460. My system was left in an unbootable state all the way back to kernel 5.4, which I was able to boot from the grub menu.

Spent most of the day wrestling with getting at least the 5.9 kernel that I was running at least working again, but now I’m all the way back to the NVIDIA 390 driver. At least I have a running system…

But if I try to install the new driver again, Yaourt tells me it’s already installed, along with a whole bunch of other files that the system thinks are installed but in truth are not. If I go into pamac and try to remove the 460 series, then it wants to remove 390 as well. So I’m clearly not gonna do that.

Does anyone have any advice on how to

  1. Get the system back to a state where it doesn’t think things are installed when they’re not?
  2. Get rid of broken grub entries so my system can boot without my manual intervention to choose Kernel 5.9?

Thanks in advance to anyone who has any ideas here.

2

I use combi of pacman and yay - never had the slightest issue with these.

3

That might be your issue, for using yaourt which has been abandoned for a quite a while now. And before it was abandoned, it had a lot of other issues.

4

So, what is the replacement for yaourt?

5

Yaourt is not maintained anymore (yaourt: a pacman frontend « Archlinux.fr). If you need an AUR helper you can use e.g. yay, as @Wollie mentioned.

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Thanks, I will investigate and install yay

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pamac is Manjaro’s installer for both Official Repo and AUR. Or you can just use pacman in the terminal.

We also have pacui, which is a TUI. It is a pacman wrapper, I use it a lot.

If you need to install from AUR, you can use pamac or one of these AUR helpers, such as pacaur or yay. pacaur and yay also can be used in pacui; pacui automatically uses them if they are installed.

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Thanks, I will check out the options. I’ve never found pamac to be particularly useful and generally prefer a CLI for this sort of thing.

10

pamac is both CLI and GUI, just fyi.

pamac build spotify builds the Spotify AUR package for example. I never use pamac via GUI. That being said, I still use pacui the most, with yay.

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Thanks… so do you have any suggestions for cleaning up the mess Yaourt left behind? Even pamac thinks things are installed that aren’t… and when I try to remove the damn NVIDIA 460 driver that’s listed it wants to remove the 390 files as well. Pretty freaking annoying.

This install is years old, and I started off with KDE and then moved to Cinnamon. I’m wondering if I should just bite the bullet and do a clean install over the root folder. My /home is on a a dedicated drive, so then I’d just have to figure out what unused/orphan junk to throw out of there.

I guess I’m at that weird user stage where I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to work my way out of the train wreck once I cause it, lol.

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IMHO… backup your stuff and reinstall Manjaro. It’ll be significantly easier than hunting down all of the packages and trying to fix your current installation.

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Kinda what I’m slowly coming to realize. Sometimes the solution is to just burn it all down. :slight_smile: I’ll solve this here.

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