Grokking Debian

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 09:44:28AM -0400, Dave Mason wrote:
>(I sent this days ago, but from the wrong address.  *sigh*)
>
>OK, things are worse than I thought.  I get the same result (exactly, modulo package name) with, e.g. cruft, gcj, firefox, gnome, just to choose some random packages.... it suggests that debian on my system is fairly borked.
>
>Any ideas?

It is possible that you've gotten bungled somewhere, but you can often
rescue things.  Squeeze is stable (I think - I don't find the Toy Story
naming convention at all helpful).  I am running testing, and  I am able
to easily install the package you mentioned.

If I were in your shoes I would try this:

- apt-get clean
-edit /etc/apt/sources.list so that you are including contrib and
 nonfree, as both might be needed for some of the dependencies
- apt-get dist-upgrade

Then try installing the package you are missing.  If that doesn't work,
try upgrading to "testing".  Let me know if you want to see my
sources.list for "testing" - I'm happy to share.
-- 

yours,

William

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