Continuing with the theme from the last couple of weeks, we’re going to talk about an issue that cropped up when upgrading my Arch Linux system.
After resolving a couple of other issues with specific packages, I attempted to upgrade my system with yay -Syu and was greeting with yet another error:
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: installing alsa-lib (1.2.12-1) breaks dependency 'alsa-lib=1.2.11' required by lib32-alsa-lib
:: installing alsa-plugins (1:1.2.12-1) breaks dependency 'alsa-plugins=1:1.2.7.1' required by lib32-alsa-plugins
-> error installing repo packagesThis error was showing up previously, but since I had another error ahead of it, it wasn’t a cause for concern at that time.
I took my usual troubleshooting approach, but tends to start with just trying the command again, in case it was a fluke. That’s followed by isolating the package in question, in this case alsa-lib and lib32-alsa-lib, and attempting to update them directly.
While that tends to resolve most of my issues, that wasn’t the case for this one. The same error was returned with each attempt I made.
Mirror mirror
After a bit of research, and chatting up an AI model, I found that the issue was due to faulty mirror.
I was skeptical that was the case, as I configure my Arch systems to automatically update the mirrors on a schedule. Note to self: figure out if mirrors are actually updating on a schedule on my Arch rig.
Unsure what actually caused this, but the fix wasn’t difficult. Simply running the reflector service got this sorted.
sudo systemctl start reflector.serviceAfter that ran, I had new mirrors, and was able to finally proceed with updating my Arch Linux system.
