[ Speaking as someone who re-installs as rarely as possible, and whose machines almost all derive (via upgrades like yours) from an install from around 2006. ]
> | The following actions will resolve these dependencies: > | > | Remove the following packages: > | 1) aptitude > | 2) liblognorm0 > | 3) libtag1-vanilla > | 4) libtag1c2a > | 5) synaptic The list of removed packages is usually the main issue. You can try "r 1" followed by "n" to see if aptitude finds another solution that doesn't remove itself, but if it can't find a good solution, you can go ahead with this and afterwards do an "apt-get install aptitude". > | Keep the following packages at their current version: > | 6) gstreamer0.10-plugins-good [Not Installed] > | 7) libcwidget3v5 [Not Installed] > | 8) libept1.4.16 [Not Installed] > | 9) libsigc++-2.0-0v5 [Not Installed] > | 10) libxapian22v5 [Not Installed] > NOTE: I'm a little puzzled at the above (6-10). Seems to be a bit > of an oxymoron or something. Yes, the output sometimes includes things which are just completely irrelevant. You safely ignore those. > | Leave the following dependencies unresolved: > | 11) aptitude-common recommends aptitude > | 12) task-lxde-desktop recommends synaptic > | 13) iceweasel recommends gstreamer0.10-plugins-good These are just recommendations (not requirements), so it's safe to leave those soft dependencies out. Personally I set Aptitude::Recommends-Important "False"; in my /etc/apt/apt.conf because I find I more often than not prefer not to include the "recommended" packages. As someone else suggested, you can also try and do it in smaller steps. E.g. do a "safe-upgrade" first. Or looking at the list of packages that are to be upgraded, pick a few important ones and upgrade them separately. E.g. I often end up doing aptitude install apt first, and maybe aptitude install ssh emacs later. For some packages (e.g. "gnome"), upgrading them may end up performing almost the complete upgrade, tho. Stefan