FAQ

Note

The following questions & answers apply to CachyOS and Arch Based distributions.

Installation

Why is KDE Plasma the only available option in the live environment?

KDE Plasma can be considered as our “flagship” desktop environment, therefore it gets the most maintenance. The other CachyOS’s ISO were maintained in a half-ass state, so to avoid any unwanted issue & inconveniences for the user if at all, we decided to deprecate them so that we can focus our efforts to deliver the best user experience.

We recommend installing CachyOS in a VM for testing out different desktop environments and window managers as the live ISO is only used for installation and recovering a broken install via cachy-chroot.

When i press “Launch Installer” nothing seems to happen…?

Caution

Make sure you have an active/running internet connection, otherwise nothing will happen after you press this button

While it might seem like nothing happened, in the background there is a script which gets triggered after pressing this button. And what does it do? Well it’s running a script for preparation that is intended to avoid possible issues such as having an outdated keyring.

I’ll give you an small heads up on what this script is doing on the background:

1. First it removes the existing keyring file found in /etc/pacman.d/gnupg.
2. Starts installing and updating both Arch Linux & CachyOS keyring packages.
3. Then it initiates and populates pacman’s keyring.
4. Enables network time synchronization to ensure the system clock is accurate executing timedatectl set-ntp true.
5. Determines and checks if the system type is either UEFI or BIOS/MBR
6. If the running system is UEFI > prompt the user to select a bootloader, otherwise don’t.

This is why it usually takes a bit of time to load.

My installation process got stuck in 33% for a while now.

This means that your internet connection is either very slow or unstable causing pacman to struggle when downloading the packages.

Software management

How can I fix the “unable to lock database” error in CachyOS?

sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck

Tip

You can achieve the same outcome by using “Remove db lock” function in CachyOS Hello in the Apps/Tweaks tab.

How can I fix possible keyring issues in CachyOS?

# Example:
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/python-charset-normalizer-3.4.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst
is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).

sudo rm -rf /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate

sudo pacman-key --recv-keys F3B607488DB35A47 --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key F3B607488DB35A47

sudo rm -R /var/lib/pacman/sync

How can I remove those annoying warnings while updating my system? Is it safe to update the system when this happens?

Example:

Yes, it is safe to update the system.

To remove these errors, run the following command:

sudo pacman -Syuu

When trying to install a package with pacman i received the following error

# Example
sudo pacman -S telegram-desktop
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (4) libdbusmenu-qt5-0.9.3+16.04.20160218-5  qt5-imageformats-5.15.2-1
             ttf-opensans-1.101-2  telegram-desktop-2.5.1-1

Total Download Size:   24.10 MiB
Total Installed Size:  67.51 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] Y
:: Retrieving packages...
error: failed retrieving file 'telegram-desktop-2.5.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from archlinux.mailtunnel.eu : The requested URL returned error: 404

This means that your local database is outdated therefore the package you’re asking for can’t be downloaded. Run the following command to refresh the package database and do a full upgrade:

sudo pacman -Syu
# Then try to install the package you want again.

What does -bin means at the end of a package name? For example librewolf-bin

This means that you’re downloading/installing a prebuilt package therefore you don’t need to compile or build it. In our repositories we store some bin packages which are basically mirrors that you can download from the AUR.

When I try to open Discord, a window opens notifying me of an update

Example:

This is because Discord released an update that is yet not available or it hasn’t been built in any of the pacman mirrors, therefore you get stuck unable to use Discord. In order to get around this issue, follow Arch Wiki’s fix guide.

I got an error while trying to clear pacman cache

Tip

You can also clear pacman’s cache using CachyOS Hello in Apps/Tweaks > Clear package cache

Example:

This usually appears when they’re some orphans packages left in /var/cache/pacman/pkg which pacman can’t delete. Run the following command to fix it.

# Removes all the orphans stored in pkg cache.
sudo rm -r /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*