Arch Linux Pacman issues

[samrap]

I know there are tons of forum posts on this, but I have found nothing on my exact problem. My Raspberry Pi just arrived and I installed Arch Linux and booted up, changed the timezone and password, just basic setup stuff. Then I initialized pacman using

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pacman-key --init

and it initialized extremely quickly. I then used

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pacman -Syu

to get the latest updates for the system. I could tell it would take a while so I went downstairs to let it do its thing and when I came back the ACTIVITY light on my Pi was off and the output screen was black with no command prompt or anything. My assumption is that somehow my Pi lost power or something, but I am not sure. Some type of error occurred, though, because when I try and run pacman to install anything, I get the following error:

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pacman: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/libgpgme.so.11: file too short

I'm not sure, but I think the power to my Pi may have been interrupted mid-installation. I checked all the root directories like

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etc

and

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bin

and all the files seem to be there, so as far as I know my installation of Arch Linux is still fine...but for some reason pacman doesn't want to work. Any idea of the problem here? This is my first experience with the Linux OS, though I've been using the command line on my UNIX OS-X for almost a year, so I'm not a total noob. Any help would be great

[sdjf]

If the power went out during the upgrade, you have a mess on your hands and the best way thing to do is to dd the image again and start over - and this time, watch things closely.

Over at the Pi subforum at archlinuxarm.org, some folks were having trouble with pacman and upgrades, but my understanding is that those issues have been fixed. Might be worth looking at the recent posts there if starting over with a fresh installation still results in problems.

http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=31

Depending on how much hassle it is to have your Pi retrieve the files for upgrading, it might be worth considering telling pacman to download all needed files to a specific external location (usb stick??) so that if the works fails again, you can retrieve them locally instead of having to take forever getting them from online. check out your options with "man pacman".

If you decide to go that route, you also might want to look at the guide I wrote for using pacman offline - it does need updating, but the basic commands remain the same.

http://sdjf.esmartdesign.com/raspberrypi/pacman.html

If a freshly dd'd image still does not perform properly when you update, make sure you post which image you have (rather than just saying you got the newest). Maybe before the upgrade, run the following and save it:

cat /proc/version

The other thing that is an absolute rule is never pull the power plug without safely shutting down the pi, and never reboot without issuing the sync command first.