Arch Tips & Tricks

A collection of tips and tricks while using Arch Linux.

Get console messages in english

If your system is configured in another language (mine is in fr-be), it's sometimes embarrassing to copy paste the result of a console log in an english speaking forum, because the messages you get are translated in your language. Here is the trick to get them in english, prepend the faulty command with LC_ALL=C.

Example

$ pacman -Syu
erreur : vous ne pouvez pas effectuer cette opération à moins d’être root.

Same command pre-pended with LC_ALL=C

$ LC_ALL=C pacman -Syu
error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root.

Where is my build-essential?

If you are used to Debian, you might be looking for all the necessary tools to build, compile and conf pacages. Here it's called base-devel

$ sudo pacman -Syu base-devel