xabbott.blg

Tupac is a front end to the Arch Linux package manager, Pacman. It’s very similar to Yaourt in that it has colored output and searches the AUR but does this all much faster. The speed is due to it’s cached implementation. All actual package installations are done with Yaourt. It was created by Pajaro and written in PHP.

Aside from the speed increase, search functionality was also improved. For instance if I search “city sim game” in Tupac I get the following results: lincity, lincity-ng, and opencity. If I do the same search in Yaourt or Pacman I will get many more unrelated results. For example I get back packages related to audacity and metacity.

Tupac is also written with other frontends in mind. As a proof of concept Pajaro has also more recently released Qupac. While still a new project it is very functional.

The only downside I could possible see with tupac is the fact that it is written in PHP and so depends on it being installed. Yaourt is a bash script and tupac it depends on it as well.

Both tupac and qupac can be found on the AUR.

Yaourt is a Pacman wrapper for Archlinux. I’ve been using it for a week or so and now wouldn’t want to be without it.

It offers colorized output, easy AUR package management, orphan clean up, and uses all the same commands as Pacman. One of the little things I like is your package search results tell you what’s installed. Here is a screenshot comparison.

The Yaourt website is in French but has screenshots. However there is a detailed post on the Archlinux forums with installation and usage documented. Or simply get it from AUR here.

Thanks to this post in the Archlinux forums my fonts look much better! I use an LCD monitor as does the poster in that thread. My fonts weren’t horrible before, but if you used Linux you know fonts can be inconsistent at times.

In any case the packages are all from AUR and are as follows: freetype2-cleartype, cairo-cleartype, and libxft-cleartype. If you’ve never used AUR or modified PKGBUILD files I highly suggest you check out the Arch wiki. You cold use Aurbuild or Yaourt to help make getting AUR packages easier.

You will need to modify the PKGBUILD file for cairo-cleartype. Change the package version from 1.2.4 to 1.2.6, then update or comment out the md5sum line.