Cannot find Nvidia driver with pacman

Question

I am following this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nvidia#Installing

The command pacman -S nvidia fails with error: target not found: nvidia, indeed, even packman -Ss nvidia to search for it results in no matches, the only package found under extra that matches "nvidia" is extra/libcl.

My /etc/pacman.conf does have [extra] repository enabled (as can be seen in the search successfully finding one item in the extra repository).

Maybe pacman's list is out of date. I have run pacman -Sy.

This means that I'm completely stuck now.

Answer 1

The reason that you were getting the "target not found" message is that your local pacman database was being used to reference a target (nvidia) that no longer existed on the mirrors, as it had since been replaced by a newer version.

The correct, and only safe, way to fix this is to first force an update of your local database with pacman -Syy and then do a full upgrade with pacman -Syu. This will ensure that all packages and their libraries are updated at the same time, preventing the possibility of breakage.

These commands can be combined with pacman -Syyu.

Answer 2

pacman -Syy updated my repos and now I was able to fetch nvidia.

From Arch docs:

Tip: Passing two --refresh or -y flags forces pacman to refresh all package lists even if they are considered to be up to date. Issuing pacman -Syy whenever changing to a new mirror is good practice and will avoid possible issues.

Something got screwed up (this machine wasn't connected to the internet for a long time, but there obviously should have been an nvidia package back when I installed Arch. No idea what went wrong here)