I’ve been using Linux off and on for the last 20 years. I’m currently moving
back to Arch Linux after a short stint on OS X (now MacOS). I am quite the Arch
noob but I’ve been completely taken by it’s simplicity and wasn’t turned off by
high barrier of entry to install.
That said, as a novice, I’m still in that “WTF is broken now??!?” phase where
I’m fighting with my system quite a bit. Today I was trying to get my MacBook
Pro completely battle ready as I can attack October full on Linux. That’s when I
started to encounter issues syncing (reads: installing) certain packages with
pacman.
The error was quite simple, there was a problem with either the signature or the
package itself. pacman would ask if I wanted to delete the package and that
would be the end of it.
I got to searching the web and found a mixed lot of solutions but nothing that
seemed to work. Thinking back to a similar issue I’ve had on other distros, I
decided to look into how to blow away the keys that pacman was using so I
could have a fresh start.
sudo rm -R /etc/pacman.d/gnupg
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman -Syy
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman -Syu
sudo pacman -S package
Was a tad bit nuclear but it got things working again!
I do think the steps could have been simplified a bit. I’m sure as I learn more
about Arch and it’s quirks I’ll be revisiting this and simplifying things a bit.
