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pacman refuses to upgrade my Arch Linux system because of a conflict between open-vm-tools-modules and the linux kernel package:

$ sudo pacman -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
 community 1988.4 KiB   970K/s 00:02 [#############################################################################] 100%
 multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: open-vm-tools-modules: requires linux<3.10

Do you have any suggestions how to analyze the problem?

3 Answers 3

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You should uninstall the openvm-tools-modules package because it's not provided by Arch Linux (anymore?), so it's not going to be updated to depend on a newer kernel. This has been "announced" on the arch-dev-public mailing list.

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  • Thanks, I switched my accepted answer. Seems to be the right way. I also encountered no downsides in removing open-vm-tools-modules so far. Jul 28, 2013 at 14:43
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Braiam's answer covered most of the possible solutions. There is one additional solution. You can upgrade the system without upgrading the kernel.

pacman -Syu --ignore linux

If you have the package linux-headers installed, you should ignore it as well.

pacman -Syu --ignore linux,linux-headers
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There are two possible solutions:

  1. Wait for Arch to update open-vm-tools-modules, so it can depends of recent kernels.
  2. Uninstall open-vm-tools-modules.
  3. Force your way through with the --force switch (Not Recommended!)

The reason why you can't upgrade is because the new kernel hasn't be tested or have new additions that breaks the packages, or the packages was made to work just with previous kernel flawlessly and must wait for new kernels to be tested and make changes if needed.

I don't think you really need the new kernel if the current works fine.

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  • @evanteitelman the "two" was intentional, so as do not use the third :/
    – Braiam
    Jul 27, 2013 at 16:03
  • My mistake. I thought it was a typo.
    – user26112
    Jul 27, 2013 at 16:24

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