[SOLVED] Synaptic failed to find a package - but it was there!

[hazel]

Someone sent me a zipped file so I need to install unzip to read it. Synaptic failed to find the package, but when I went to the Debian site and looked under etch, I found it straight away in the utilities section. I was able to download and install it using dpkg -i. The strange thing is that the mirror I downloaded it from is in my /etc/apt/sources.lst. So why couldn't synaptic find this package?

[b2bwild]

May be because the repository wasnt updated.
apt-get or synaptic reads the packages.gz which contains the list of files.
repository must be reformed after adding packages to root directory of server.
while synaptic reads old packages.gz list.

[hazel]

Are you referring to my using apt-get update or synaptic/reload? Because I always do that before doing anything else.

[devils casper]

apt-get update and Synaptic/Reload are same thing. Synaptic is just a GUI of apt-get.
Could you post the contents of sources.list file here?

[hazel]

apt-get update and Synaptic/Reload are same thing. Synaptic is just a GUI of apt-get.

Yes, I knew that. I generally use synaptic as I like the interface.

Could you post the contents of sources.list file here?

When I tried to paste it in, vb did something funny to it, so I've attached it instead.

The mirror that I downloaded from was ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ etch main.

[hazel]

Oops! I now have egg all over my face. The problem lay in the way I had set up the Synaptic search function. I must have pressed the wrong button at some stage. I have fixed it to search for package names (which is what I thought it was doing all along) and things are now found correctly. Remember how I once couldn't find bzip2 and ended up installing it from source? That was due to the same glitch.