Updating the system

VasakOS is rolling release: there are no versions that fall behind, and no big migration every couple of years. Updates arrive continuously from the Arch Linux repositories and from the VasakOS repository.

The notification#

You do not need to remember. VasakOS checks for updates two minutes after you log in, and then once a day, and lets you know when there is something. If the machine was off when the check was due, it checks as soon as it starts.

The notification does not repeat itself every day: as long as the set of pending packages does not change, it stays quiet for a week, or until the kernel changes.

In Settings → Updates you can see what there is to update, what is worth checking before doing it — whether there is room on the boot partition, whether any .pacnew files are still unapplied, whether a reboot will be needed and why — and from there you can turn the notification off or change how often it checks.

It still cannot apply updates from there: that needs administrator privileges and is going to be part of the store. For now, apply them from the terminal.

Updating#

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sudo pacman -Syu

That is all. It updates the base system and the VasakOS applications in the same operation.

Never use pacman -Sy package to install a single thing. It syncs the database without updating the system and leaves the machine in a mixed state —old libraries with new packages— which is the number one cause of broken systems on Arch. Always -Syu.

How often#

Once a week is fine. What is worth avoiding is letting months go by: the bigger the update, the more likely something will need manual intervention.

Before a large update, check for announcements in   the blog and in   Arch Linux news .

And one more reason not to let months pass: the notification does not distinguish a security update from an ordinary one, because the pacman package database has no field that says so. Whoever defers updates also defers the ones that close a hole, without noticing that they were different. This is explained in   Security .

.pacnew files#

When an update brings a new version of a configuration file you edited, pacman does not overwrite it: it leaves it alongside with the .pacnew extension.

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sudo pacdiff

pacdiff (from the pacman-contrib package) goes through them one by one and lets you compare and merge. Ignoring them indefinitely means new services run with old configuration.

Freeing space#

pacman keeps every package it downloads. Over time that is several GB:

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sudo paccache -r        # keeps the last 3 versions of each package
sudo paccache -ruk0     # removes those of uninstalled packages

Rolling back an update#

If an update broke something, you can reinstall the previous version from pacman’s cache:

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ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ | grep package-name
sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/package-name-VERSION.pkg.tar.zst

To stop the next update from upgrading it again while you investigate, add it temporarily to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf:

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IgnorePkg = package-name

Remember to remove it once the problem is resolved: a package frozen indefinitely ends up incompatible with the rest of the system.

If the system does not boot after updating#

1. In the boot menu, choose an earlier kernel entry if one is available.

2. If there is none, boot from the installation USB in Live mode and mount your installation:

   1 2	sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt sudo arch-chroot /mnt

   From there you can reinstall packages or read the logs with journalctl -b -1 -p err.

3. Save those logs: they are exactly what is needed to   report the problem .