(Solved) Having trouble installing vlc and openoffice

Question

I am having trouble installing both VLC and Openoffice.
VLC
I tried typing in:
yaourt -S vlc
At first, it finds the package, and the first time I did it, downloaded quite a bit of stuff, and then it failed after installing a rather large package and then says :
error: failed retreiving file 'vlc-0.9.9a-6-i686.pkg.tar.bz' from archlinux.unix.heads.org : Not Found
Any idea what may be causing this?
OpenOffice
I tried typing in:
yaourt -S openoffice
Then it said it could not find openoffice in my /etc/customizepkg.d and then asks me to change my PKGBUILD and I had no idea what to edit in it.
Then, it tried to install it,  and it tells me svn is not found in AUR.
What does this mean and how can I get openoffice?
Last edited by iscalio (2009-07-09 08:26:02)

Answer 1

You need to use the -y flag to update your local repository list.
Ie pacman -Sy
You can conveniently combine all of your tasks..
pacman -Sy vlc openoffice-base
Error retrieving a file means either
A) The mirror you are using is updating itself and you were unlucky enough to sync right when it was doing so.. youll need to wait a little while and try -Sy again then..
B) Related to A.. your database could be either older or newer than the mirror you are using. If you switched mirrors recently, this happens sometimes. Most mirrors update ~daily, but some update ~weekly. -Sy to sync.. you could try -Syy to force a full sync so that even lists of supposedly up-to-date repositories (core,extra,so forth) are synced (doing so is only good/useful if you have problems)..
C) Your mirror is offline.. change it to another one in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
D) Your internet is not running / your DNS is not working properly.. try to ping a site you know is online to be sure. Google is always a good choice. ping www.google.com. You can ctrl+c to end it if it responds as expected. Fix your internet (see the wiki) and domain name server (/etc/resolv.conf and your router) if you have problems.
You may or may not also wish to pacman -Scc in order to clean out your cache of saved packages in case there is a download problem.
Your post gives the impression you don't understand pacman vs yaourt.. apologies if i'm wrong, but just in case:
Pacman is used for official binary repository files. Yaourt can do pacman's job in addition to its own with the same syntax (imo it does a pretty slow and lousy job of such though), but it's real original function is primarily to install 3rd party / community packages that the Arch devs either can't or won't maintain (and most often, have not "ok"ed them as safe to install). You should look at yaourt in the wiki.. when it asks you to change the pkgbuild I imagine you mean when it says 'what do you want to edit it with?'.. which you dont need to edit it at all. The reason it asks you is because yaourt can install stuff from AUR, which like I said is 3rd party / community stuff that can contain something malicious (AUR is open to submissions, unlike the official repositories) and you are highly advised to look it over for something fishy before compiling and installing. FYI -- believe me, you don't want to compile openoffice without reaaally good reason on a really fast machine. It hurts. Your machine will be as usable as a doorstop for a very long time while it's doing it's business. Just save your time and patience, install the compiled binary via pacman instead.
Please use the wiki, forum search functions, and man pages. Most of the Arch community is friendly and knowledgeable, but people get (rightly) irked when their work maintaining the aforementioned to answer queries like this one are ignored.
Last edited by FrozenFox (2009-07-09 03:26:02)