Although I use Gentoo as my Primary desktop distro, I also have an Arch Linux machine. I use it for hand off kinda things. Skype, IM , Network Monitoring to name a few. Recently, my ISP has been suckish (Comcast, they’re Craptastic!) and it’s affected pacman in that pacman hangs during caching and downloading the packages. This has really been a pisser. Ctl+C to stop pacman, then rm -rf /var/lib/pacman/db.lck to remove the lock file then start over. Sometimes several times. AARRRGGHHHH!!!

Enter RTFM !! Read the Fuking Manual!! The Man pages are your friend !!!

It seems that you can change the settings in /etc/pacman.conf to use wget! If you don’t know; wget rocks ! Its a fast light command line transfer application but, I digress, that is for another post, another day.

so, su -c 'vi /etc/pacman.conf'
Locate the line “XferCommand = ” in pacman.conf (It’s probably commented out)
Change this line to read: Xfercommand = /usr/bin/wget -t 3 -T 30 -c -O %o %u
This line all ready exists but there are two additional flags to add to it. The -t 3 and -T 30. These options set a timeout and a retry setting.
That does it for me. Although it does still get stuck on downloads that take longer than 5 mintes, it automatically restarts itself after 30 seconds and is able to continue on. And, I like the way wget looks when it is working!

Happy Slackin !

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