Hi. For a few years I've been using Arch Linux but the idiotic systemd is crawling on my nerves, so I decided to change it. So far Artix seems to do some things better (I tried it in a VM) but there's one "problem" that I can't solve. It's in quotes because it's not exactly a problem: in Arch I use pamac-classic as updates notifier, meaning that whenever there are package updates available, it changes the icon in tray which means there are new updates. However, searching for pamac-classic in Artix found nothing, so my question is: is there anything else I could use in Artix to notify me whenever there are updates available?
Artix is a "rolling release (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release)" distro. Updates are constantly released. You should by default periodically update at regular intervals, at least once a week.
Official package management program is pacman (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman). To update your system as root:
pacman -Syu
Refer to the linked article for more information.
I'm doing the updates through terminal anyway, I just need a visual notifier with a similar function as pamac-classic.
I see no point in update notification. In a rolling release distribution, you are expected to periodically update, and to check for updates, notification programs must download the database from the mirror anyway.
That said, octopi and pamac are in unofficial "universe" repository (https://artixlinux.org/news.php#Octopi_and_Pamac_moved_to_%5Buniverse%5D).
Looks like I'm gonna use the good ol' compiling from source cuz without pamac-classic my desktop feels empty. :)
The package pacman-contrib provides the checkupdates script which tells you what packages on your local machine are out of sync with the mirrors (i.e. out of date), I don't know what DE or WM you're using, but I just have a script in my statusbar that, every hour, pipes the output of checkupdates to wc -l, perhaps that's something you could use in some way?
I have no clue how pamac works, but I don't see why you can't just configure it to use artix repos.
pamac-classic (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pamac-classic) is available in AUR
There are some systemd services, you might need to convert them
Awhile ago I wrote a small script, which does exactly that thing - periodically checks for updadtes, and displays a notification if there is any. Script's comments should be sufficient to explain how it works and how to use it.
chkupd.sh
#!/bin/sh
#==2010.12.28
#--just created
#--
#--chkupd.sh
#--
#--checks for updates, and displays
#--notification if there is|are any
#--
#--based on checkupdates tool from
#--pacman-contrib package
#--
#--meant to be added to startup
#--applications
#--
#--attention - uses infinite loop:
#--
#--infinite loop
#-- sleep for 1 minute (1m)
#-- check for updates
#-- sleep for 59 minutes (59m)
#--endloop
#--
#--optionally, accepts two sleep
#--time parameters (1s, 10m, 2h, etc)
#--
#--first parameter sets the time
#--before the check is performed
#--
#--second parameter sets the time
#--after the check was performed
#--
#--by default, 1m and 59m set
#--hourly checks execution
#--
#--example invocations:
#--
#--chkupd.sh
#--chkupd.sh 1m 9m
#--chkupd.sh 1m 14m
#--chkupd.sh 1h 2h
#--chkupd.sh 1m 189m
#--chkupd.sh 1m 239m
#--
#--see man sleep for correct
#--time argument syntax
#--
#==
cnt=0
num=0
hdr=''
msg=''
loop=true
waitbefore=1m
waitafter=59m
if [ $# -eq 2 ]
then
waitbefore=$1
waitafter=$2
fi
while [ $loop == true ]
do
sleep $waitbefore
num=$(checkupdates | awk '{++cnt} END {print cnt}')
if [ "$num" == '' ]
then
hdr='Debug: Software Management'
msg='There are no available updates'
else
if [ $num -eq 1 ]
then
hdr='Software Management'
msg="There is $num update available"
else
hdr='Software Management'
msg="There are $num updates available"
fi
fi
notify-send --urgency=normal --expire-time=5000 --app-name='Software Management' "$hdr" "$msg"
sleep $waitafter
done
exit 0
Bundle:
octopi
octopi-notifier-qt5
- the best solution
So clearly pamac is still available unofficially... sweet.
octopi is good