Fixing Missing Manjaro Updates

I’ve written previously about having to change mirrors in Manjaro Linux when my current mirror was unavailable. Recently I ran into a slightly different flavor of issue where my system consistently told me no updates were available. Running my normal update command…

sudo pacman -Syu

… would tell me…

there is nothing to do

This seemed weird to me since Manjaro is has a rolling release model; I typically feel like there are updates available every time I boot this laptop. Going for over a month without any updates let me know that something definitely seemed amiss. Manjaro still provides year and month release tracking just so you have some idea where a system may be at with respect to updates. I checked that by running:

cat /etc/lsb-release

This told me I was on release 21.10. Checking the official download page, though, showed that 21.12 was available. This made sense since this is being written in mid-January. Likewise, Firefox was on version 94 when Firefox 96 is the current release. Clearly something was up.

After a handful of searches, I hit upon a Reddit thread where someone mentioned not seeing the latest Linux kernel available for their Manjaro installation. The recommendation was to flip to a different mirror. Thinking maybe I was having a much worse version of the same problem — i.e. my mirror was reporting as up by wasn’t syncing any new updates — I first checked my current mirror by looking in:

/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

This showed the top mirror on the list as:

Next up, I looked at the Manjaro mirror status page for the state of distro.ibiblio.org:

For those keeping score at home, the “1098” number is how many hours since the mirror has synced. 1098 hours comes out to around 45 days. Suffice to say, it makes sense I wasn’t seeing any new updates. The Open Computing Facility at Berkeley seemed like something that would be reliable, so I simply updated the top line in my /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file with:

Server = https://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/manjaro/arm-stable/$repo/$arch

I kicked off a full sync of updates via the following command and had just shy of 1 GB of compressed updates available, expanding out to over 3 GB of installed space:

sudo pacman -Syyu

After the installation completed, re-checking the content of /etc/lsb-release showed my system as being on the 22.01 release:

One thing I never knew before but just happened to see when my system was installing these updates was that Manjaro can actually check the status of the configured mirrors. Simply run the command:

sudo pacman-mirrors

This runs through the mirrors configured in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and reports back on the state of each. Since I unfortunately wasn’t aware of this until after I fixed the issue, I didn’t get to see what it would report for broken mirrors. My current output looked clean: