Error: Cannot find the fakeroot binary on Arch Linux

As you may already be aware, my blog is primarily a chronicle of the issues I’ve
faced and how I’ve went about solving them. Switching back to Arch Linux from
Debian recently, and left me with no shortage of new gotchas to document.
Nothing that’s left me thinking moving back to Arch was a bad idea, but enough
to keep the ol’ blog moving.

One of the first things I do after setting up and booting into an Arch Linux install for the first time, is to install a package manager that supports the Arch User Repository (AUR).

The AUR is one of my favorite things about Arch, but to use it in a tenable way,
you need to install a package manager wrapper than that can properly talk to it.

For me, that package manager wrapper is yay. I’ve been using it for quite a
while now, since yaourt was abandoned, or whatever the heck happened there.

To install a package from the AUR without having a helper application, you need to download the PKGBUILD file, and make the package manually. It’s not a hard process, but if I had to do that for every application I installed from the AUR, I’d probably be shopping for a new Linux distro.

So the “new to me” error this go around, while trying to install yay was
receiving this error:

% makepkg -si
==> ERROR: Cannot find the fakeroot binary.

As mentioned, this was new to me, as I don’t ever remember running into this
before. The reason for that, is because in previous adventures, I installed the
base-devel package earlier in the process and failed to do so this time.

So to get things moving, simply install base-devel:

% pacman -S base-devel

Or, if so desired, you can install the specific packages necessary, instead of
base-devel:

% sudo pacman -S binutils make gcc pkg-config fakeroot