FAQ

1) Where did this name Octopi come from? Is it related to that James Bond movie? Which movie? Octopussy? Nah… The project has this name as a tribute to Pacman – the arcade game. As (once) stated in Wikipedia: “The enemies in Pac-Man are known variously as ‘ghosts’, ‘goblins’, ‘octopi’ and ‘monsters’.

2) Why do I get a message saying “There are no means to get administrator’s credentials.”? That’s because you probably do not have “kdesu” or “gksu” installed in your system. Octopi uses this type of su frontends to escalate privileges, so it can run pacman commands that writes in the local package database.

3) Su frontends? Why didn’t you just let Octopi being run by root? First because we could not manage to get it run properly, as the curl output which is generated by pacman simply vanishes. And without this output we cannot update our tab percentages, leaving our users without progress feedback during transactions. And second and more important, because running a GUI app under root is a serious security hole.

4) Why haven’t you used libALPM instead of calling pacman’s binary directly? Humm, there are two main reasons. First, if we were to make that decision, we’d have to duplicate lots of pacman code (to ensure the rock solid stability users are used to expect) as well as deal with API breakages, which may arrive in newer versions. And second because we really appreciate pacman software. We think it’s a hell of a good package management tool: fast, feature rich and well tested!

5) Why are there lags when I click on a package in Octopi’s package list? Well, if you happen to click in a package and the selected tab are “Info” or “Files”, there may be a little lag before the correct information is shown. This is just a penalty of using pacman’s binary for collecting information about packages. If you’re not believing us, just do a little test: open a console (do not need to be root) and write: “pacman -Si <any package name here>”. If you use to have a lag in Octopi you’ll surely have a lag doing that.

6) Why did sometimes I get conflict errors and my transactions are aborted when upgrading some outdated packages? Good one! This may occur due to the package you’re trying to update being part of a chain of necessary updates. Normally this can be fixed just doing a system upgrade in Octopi. But if you still got trouble, you’d better open a console and trying to do a manual update using pacman.

7) Open a console??? No!!! I was hoping Octopi was the ‘silver bullet’, the application that would ‘rule them all’, so I would forget about opening terminals and typing obscure pacman commands, forever. No, my friend… such a tool is yet to be developed and I’m pretty sure it’ll have its debut in Alice’s Wonderland.

8) Why Octopi’s icon keeps changing from green to yellow to red? This is just a reminder for you! When Octopi’s icon is green it means NO package installed in your system is outdated. When it is yellow, it means there are some outdated AUR packages. Otherwise, when it’s red, this indicates SOME official packages need an upgrade. To see which packages are outdated, just click the statusbar red label in the lower right corner of the screen. After your next successful system upgrade, Octopi’s icon will return to it’s greenish (or yellowish) form 🙂