Arch Linux has had some major changes recently and this has made updating a neglected installation a bit tricky.

However, I managed a flawless update on a system that hasn’t been touched since May.

Before you do anything, go to the Arch Linux news page and read everything since your last update. If a package needs manual intervention make sure you add it to –ignore list when the time comes.

Firstly, you want to get setup for the new /lib symlink. There is a guide here – however, you will need to ignore some other packages as well. The main goal here is to stop pacman from breaking:

pacman -Ud http://pkgbuild.com/~allan/glibc-2.16.0-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -Syu --ignore glibc,curl,libarchive,bash,gpgme,filesystem,fontconfig

So, we’ve installed Allan’s special glibc version and we’ve updated the whole system while ignoring all of pacman’s dependencies. I also ignored filesystem and fontconfig as they need intervention. You will almost definitely be asked to upgrade pacman first and foremost. Do that when offered.

Next I updated the filesystem package:

pacman -S filesystem --force

Then I updated all of pacman’s deps:

pacman -S glibc curl libarchive bash gpgme

Lastly, I fixed the conflicts for the fontconfig package and did another system update.

find /etc/fonts/conf.d -type l -exec rm {} ;
pacman -Su

Word of caution – once your system is up to date and make sure you update the initramfs, just in case.

mkinitcpio -p linux

You will also have to upgrade to systemd compatible settings. Next post is about how I handled that.