[Wolves] Dependencies and Ubuntu 7.10

[Adam Sweet]

leei at webmail.co.za wrote:
>> Out of interest, what is it that you are trying to install that is
>> giving dependency hell?  Is it one program or many?  If it's many then
>> I'd say that it must be a setting that has, for reason, been
>> incorrectly set when 7.10 was installing.  It does sometimes happen
>> :-(  However, if it is one specific program then it could be a bug
>> with that.
>>
> It is just when I am installing applications from the command line that it
> tells me that there are dependancies but if the application gets installed
> from the gui from the add applications section then that works. I wanted
> to install some applications for example the scanning software for my
> scanner needed glibc installed so I had to install that first then the
> software.
> I wanted to install Limewire so I had to install java manually.

Ok, something is wrong here, but I guess you knew that already. Glibc
should always be installed as it provides much of the primitive
functionality required by almost everything above the kernel. I doubt
your machine would be usable without glibc. What I suspect has happened
is that either:

a) Your apt sources.list is b0rked
b) You have dangling dependencies from 7.04
c) Something else to do with apt broke during your upgrade

I know you had problems with the upgrade. Apt is the tool that deals
with package installation and upgrade, it is essentially an easy to use
CLI front-end to dpkg the Debian package manager. Just to make sure
we're on the same page... To use apt, you do one of the following:

apt-get update     #to get the latest package lists
apt-get upgrade    #to get the latest version of all of your packages
apt-get dist-upgrade   #to upgrade to a newer distro release
apt-get install packagename
apt-get remove packagename
apt-get --purge remove packagename #removes config files along with package

I had some problems with the upgrade too as I upgraded 2 weeks before
the release, but I searched Google for the errors and I have to
--force-overwrite some doc files which were provided by 2 packages that
clashed. If ever you get an error that you don't understand when doing
an upgrade between OS releases, always paste it into Google to see what
the solution is.

I think the best thing here would be to post your /etc/apt/sources.list
to see what you have:

cat /etc/apt/sources.list

I've not come across a setting which determines whether apt or Synaptic
won't handle deps for you. Dpkg doesn't handle deps I don't think, I
assume you're using apt here?

In a worst case scenario, you might either have to live with the
situation, which will suck, or you might have to do a fresh install
(backup your home directories!). But before you get to that point, try
the Ubuntu forums if we can't help you.

Regards,

Adam Sweet

-- 

http://blog.adamsweet.org