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Software Maintenance on PCLinuxOS

The title of this page sounds like something simple to accomplish. It can be a simple task, or it can be as complicated as you want it to be. One philosophy behind Linux is the ability to be able to add software from any source you wish.

PCLinuxOS has only one repository (mirrored on numerous sites worldwide) for all installable software, and that repository is generally kept up to date. The main repository is hosted at NLUUG (Netherlands UNIX Users Group). The repository mirror in the US is located at the main campus of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Before Flatpak and Appimage were supported in PCLinuxOS, the official method of installing and maintaining software was to use the Synaptic Package Manager. PCLinuxOS uses RPM packages for software distribution, and third party packages are not recommended for reasons regarding security and stability of PCLinuxOS itself, unless that package is one of the following:

  1. The package is distributed as a Flatpak or Appimage package.
  2. The RPM is a device driver or utility needed to get certain devices, such as printers, scanners or video boards working. Even then, it would be a good idea to request such packages on the user forum.
  3. The package is to be installed in your home directory for local use. This could be a self-contained package, or a software package you are compiling from source.

Traditionally, the /usr/local and /opt directories are ideal for third party software installation. Flatpak and Appimages install in a subdirectory of /var as their way of keeping the internal code of these packages separate from the PCLinuxOS installation.

The best place to install third party binaries is ~/bin. (Yes, you must create this directory from within your home directory, as ~/bin is not present after installing PCLinuxOS to your hard drive.)

By using /usr/local, /opt and ~/bin, you ensure that third party software will not interfere with your PCLinuxOS installation. If you choose to use /opt, check the contents of that directory to be sure there is not already a software package with the same name in the /opt directory so that your third party package installation does not conflict with anything in your PCLinuxOS installation.

For software packages such as Eclipse (if you want the latest version), which come in a tarball and are Java applications, I recommend installing these in an empty directory within your home directory. For example: ~/eclipse. (The version that comes with PCLinuxOS is rather dated, but stable and quite usable at that, as a traditional Java development environment. The latest version of Eclipse is a complete software ecosystem, with its own repositories, that needs to be updated as often as you update PCLinuxOS itself.)

Keeping PCLinuxOS up to date

If you have installed PCLinuxOS from a 2020 ISO release, you will notice that every time you boot PCLinuxOS, the system will automatically check for software updates.

You should see a checkmark on a green background if there are no updates available at the moment. If you do not see any icon, or you see a bell on a red background, you will need to proceed with the following procedure.

Manually Keeping PCLinuxOS Up To Date

There is only one official method to keeping PCLinuxOS up to date. You must be connected to the Internet when you do this as the procedure can involve large transfers of data from the Internet.

  1. Launch Synaptic Package Manager. You will need to supply the superuser (or administrator) password.
  2. Click on the Reload button. This refreshes the package lists Synaptic uses.
  3. Click on Select All Upgrades.
  4. Click on Apply to complete the process.

If you click on the Status button, you will see a listing in the sidebar within Synaptic. If New in Repository appears in the list, this means that new packages have been added to the PCLinuxOS repository. You may want to select this to see if you want to add the new packages to your installation.

You may also click on the red icon and select Update from the popup menu. The update will be done automatically.

The initial update for a fresh PCLinuxOS install weighs in at just under one gigabyte for the Plasma 5 version.

If you are on a DSL connection, this should take about an hour to complete.

However, if you are on a mobile broadband connection, keep this factor in mind as updating PCLinuxOS will consume your data plan. I recommend using a internet connection that has an unlimited data plan, or a data plan with enough gigabytes to allow for updating.

If you do end up running out of data on your data plan, what happens depends on the mobile broadband provider. In the case of Verizon Wireless (which I recommend) and AT&T, your internet connection will slow down to DSL speeds. However, if you are using Straight Talk, your service will shut down until you purchase and redeem another data plan card.

Installing and Maintaining LibreOffice and VirtualBox

LibreOffice is installed and maintained on PCLinuxOS by the LibreOffice manager package, a script that automates the process of downloading the tarball containing RPM packages that make up the LibreOffice distribution. When LibreOffice is updated, you will be able to download an update of the LibreOffice manager (called lomanager in Synaptic).

LibreOffice Manager will check to see if the system has been updated properly before attempting to install and/or update LibreOffice. If there are uninstalled updates, you will be asked to update PCLinuxOS before you can install LibreOffice.

The current version of LibreOffice weighs in at more than 220MB and it's getting larger.

LibreOffice requires some version of Java be installed. The easiest way to do this is to launch Synaptic and install task-java, which can be found in the Tasks section of Synaptic. Click on Apply to install all the required files.

Since the original writing of this article, Oracle Virtualbox is maintained the same way, with separate utilities.

Each time you update VirtualBox or the system kernel, you will need to reboot PCLinuxOS to ensure that all changes to the system are properly applied.

In addition, you will need to open a terminal window (such as Konsole), type in su to login as the system administrator, then type /sbin/vboxconfig to recompile the kernel modules needed to get VirtualBox working properly.

Don't Forget to Update the Linux Kernel(s)

When we use Synaptic to update the PCLinuxOS system, the system kernel does not get automatically updated.

Currently, there are multiple linux kernels that can be installed from Synaptic, namely:

To update these, launch Synaptic Package Manager (and login as the administrator, if you have not done so), then click on Sections and select System/Kernel and Hardware.

Next, scroll the listing down until you see the kernel packages (the ones with "kernel" in the name. If there are updates to the kernel, they will be highlighted with a star. Select those packages (and also deselect the previous kernel version(s) to ensure a true upgrade, and not simply adding a new kernel to the system), then click on Apply to download and upgrade the system kernel(s) in your PCLinuxOS installation.

It is OK to have more than one kernel installed. In fact it is a good idea to do so, in case the latest version of the kernel does not work properly, in which case, the alternative kernel is available to ensure you can boot PCLinuxOS. When you have more than one kernel installed, the lastest version of the kernel installed will boot by default unless you specify otherwise in the boot loader (GRUB or GRUB2).