i decided to give arch a try because gentoo is always pissing me off, if i try to upgrade something on my system the ebuilds usually crap out from some error and im sick of wiping the system and starting over... too much time.

i installed arch the first time, went quick, i figured out pacman , synced, installed xfce and the mouse didn't work. i had used the default ide kernel and i figured ps/2 mice support wasn't compiled in for some reason because i did the xf86config the same way i always did with every other distro and they all worked. i didn't think ( untill later) to pull the kernel source off the cd or use lynx to get it, all i knew was the source wasn't installed to /usr/src/linux. so i decided to reinstall and compile the kernel during the install. i did. Ofcourse the thing couldnt open a console or something during boot so i had to reinstall. i did, this time using the default kernel but with the intention of copying the source off the install disk and compiling it from there. at this step i run into a new problem. pacman isn't doing a damn thing. (good place to start a new paragraph)

i do a "modprobe 8139too" (load my ethernet card module) do "dhcpcd", "ifconfig", see that etho is listed, do "ping www.google.com" get packets back with 0% packet loss, try a pacman -y and get absolutely no messages like retrieving sync file or database file or whatever (list of programs) i do pacman -Su nothing happens, no error, nothing. i do pacman -S xfce. and it says that xfce is not listed in the database. i try it with a few other programs and get the same message. i reinstall a couple of times and get the same problem. luckily the install is fast, but frustrating just the friggin same! are all of the pacman servers down? what's goin on. the mouse porblem i can figure out on my own (mostlikely), but why am i now getting nothing from pacman?

summary
-internet works, checked using ifconfig and ping (getting a response from the outside world)
-pacman did work for me, but now doesn't

XF86 use /dev/mouse as default mouse device.
Arch Linux use devfs for devices and as any distro /dev/mouse is a soft link to the real device, so if you use a PS2 mouse just put /dev/psaux in xf86config or make a link to psaux

Pacman use OPTIONS togheter with an OPERATION, so according to the documentation doing just -y without specifing an operation does not give any result.

Once installed, in the documentation, there are several example on how to use pacman. one of the best thing to do is:
pacman -Syu
this download the new package database then download and upgrade with new version of the installed package.
Before doing this check /etc/pacman.conf
Here there are 3 section:
STABLE
CURRENT
UNOFFICIAL
The first one is for stable package, tipically the one on the last release of the distro.
CURRENT contain all the package updated when new programs version came out
DO NOT USE STABLE and CURRENT at the same time
UNOFFICIAL there are contribution from the comunity.
The quality of the unoffical are under control of the maintainers of the distro.

Your other problem with pacman are dure to a not correct use of it.
Doing pacman -Su without doing an upgrade of the db give no result since the db is not up to date and the local db is in sync with the current installation.
I hope I was helpfull.

You're probably not used to devfs:
http://www.archlinux.org/docs/archdo...00000000000000

Devfs again:
http://www.archlinux.org/docs/archdo...00000000000000

Try pacman -Syu

You need the -S. See the manpage or pacman --help

Also note that some packages are not in the main package repository. You have to manually enable the additional repositories by editing your /etc/pacman.conf and uncommenting the [unofficial] and [unstable] blocks. Then resync with -Sy and you will have additional packages at your disposal. Pacman's -Ss option is also useful when searching for packages.

HTH

thanks, it was the pacman -Sy thing. i guess i forgot it the second time around. arch is running great so far, installs are quick as hell. ofcourse all problems due to my stupidity. ( i just d/l opera 7.11, looks great)