On Wednesday 10 November 2004 19:15, downtime null wrote: > Hello Debian Users! > > Let me start by saying that I am new to Debian, not Linux. I'm not > familiar with some of the conventions and tools specific to Debian. I > switched to Debian because I've always heard great things about its > package management and I know that it uses binary packages (as opposed > to Gentoo, which has fantastic package management, but only uses > source). > > I would like to upgrade to at least KDE 3 (3.3 would be nice), but apt > is giving me fits. I'm sure it's something simple that I'm just > overlooking. When I type the command 'apt-get -f install kde', I get : > > Reading Package Lists... Done > Building Dependency Tree... Done > Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have > requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable > distribution that some required packages have not yet been created > or been moved out of Incoming. > > Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that > the package is simply not installable and a bug report against > that package should be filed. > The following information may help to resolve the situation: > > Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies: > kde: Depends: kde-core but it is not going to be installed > Depends: kde-amusements but it is not going to be installed > E: Sorry, broken packages > > The only line I have in my sources.list is : > > deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib > > I'm using testing because stable seems to use thoroughly tested but very > outdated packages. Shouldn't the '-f' switch cause apt-get to resolve > the dependencies? > > As an alternative, and I hate to even suggest this, is it generally > considered a Bad Thing (tm) to use RPMs in Debian? > > I'm having some other issues with my system, but I'd like to get this > resolved first and take things one step at a time. > > Any help in this matter is appreciated. > > Thanks.
The nice thing about apt-get and its ilk is that they will keep recursing until all dependencies are solved or determined to be unsolvable. The not so nice thing is that the error messages won't recurse all the way down. What you tried to install, kde, is a metapackage. It depends on other packages, which you can see if you use "apt-cache show kde". Of those dependencies, kde-core and kde-amusements had problems, but the rest were OK. If you then type apt-get install kde-core kde-amusements, the output should tell you that one or more packages these depend on will not be installed. You can do this until you see the actual cause of the problem. Alternately, since kde is a metapackage, you could elect to install only the components you know you want, letting apt-get take care of the dependencies, but hopefully avoiding the broken package that's keeping all of kde from going in at once. Note that this is what makes testing and unstable different from stable: packages will be broken from time to time (though not that often). They usually get fixed quickly, though occasionally they have lasted a while. Hope that helps, Justin Guerin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
