Grokking Debian

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:22:26AM -0400, Dave Mason wrote:
> I've been programming for 40 years, teaching Computer Science for 30, doing Linux sysadmin since the early Slackware days (call it 15 years) and Unix admin for 10 years before that, but Debian continues to frustrate me, although I'm convinced it's "the right thing".
> 
> My current challenge: I have the following sources.list:
> 
> deb http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
> deb-src http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
> deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
> deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
> deb http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/debian-multimedia/ squeeze main
> deb-src http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/debian-multimedia/ squeeze main
> 
> apt-get update gives no errors, 13 Get lines,
> 
> and this page, http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/v4l-utils , describes the availability of v4l-utils in squeeze.
> 
> But:
> 
> : ~ ; sudo apt-get install v4l-utils
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree       
> Reading state information... Done
> Package v4l-utils is not available, but is referred to by another package.
> This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
> is only available from another source
> 
> E: Package 'v4l-utils' has no installation candidate
> 
> *What* am I doing wrong?

Works when I try it on a machine running squeeze here.

I must admit I avoid ftp.ca.debian.org since at least one machine in
that DNS rotation is often broken, out of date and/or missing stuff.

I do also tend to turn on contrib and non-free, but that should not be
necesary in this case.

What you are doing should be working.

What about doing this:

grep 'Package: v4l-utils' /var/lib/apt/lists/*

You should see something like:
rceng03:~# grep 'Package: v4l-utils' /var/lib/apt/lists/*
/var/lib/apt/lists/rceng02.eng.lan_debian_dists_squeeze_main_binary-powerpc_Packages:Package: v4l-utils
/var/lib/apt/lists/rceng02.eng.lan_debian_dists_squeeze_main_source_Sources:Package: v4l-utils

Of course your server name and architecture will be different.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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