Resolving dependencies KDE / Deb Wheezy

[Steven_G]

I’m still working on all the goofy hardware stuff. I’ve found a possible solution in DEB7. But I’ve hit a wall and now I’m stuck.

The DEB7 installer is still in beta and crashes when detecting my network. So I tried a vertical bootstrap from 6 to 7 and ended up with an unbootable mess.

Now I’m in the middle of a lateral bootstrap from LMDE 202104 x64 XFCE to Wheezy x64 KDE.

On install of LMDE I ran the updates as it pointed to the (behind the curve) mint frozen version of current testing (wheezy).

The I #’d out all of the mint PPA’s and pointed updates @wheezy and sec updates @squeeze, then ran updates again.

I pulled in a ton of stuff, updated and rebooted.

At that point I had two different versions of the same kernel in grub. (3.2.x.x) I don’t remember exact version and I’m not at my box. I *think* they were both the exact same version. (I might be wrong on this point. It was getting late enough that I was getting punchy.)

I booted in to the one at the top of the list as I figured that was *probably* the newest one.

I ran updates again and pulled in a bunch more stuff. But ‘gtk2-engines” was held back by apt-get because it conflicted with the mint version. I’m slowly but surely blowing all the mint out of it. So I ran “sudo apt-get install –f” and forced the install. Which triggered the uninstall of several mint specific packages (don’t remember exact) as well as uninstalling XFCE; which was no great loss as I’m blowing out all the mint and not a fan of XFCE anyway.

Then I hit the wall.

I figure if I reboot at this point I’ll still have a functional system, but with no DE. My command line skills are coming along. But I still use the GUI as a crutch, so I don’t want to boot in to the shell if I can avoid it.

So I figured I’d install KDE full, my fav DE, before the next reboot. And now I’m stuck chasing my tail in dependency hell as nothing I try will install the KDE deps or fix the unspecified “broken package” error messages I’m getting.

I’ve tried:

sudo dpkg –configure –a

(Also tried this one from root w/o sudo)

sudo apt-get install kde-full –f

(Also tried variations on this w/ aptitude and w/wo -f switch)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

(Also tried variations on this with both w/ aptitude and w/wo -f switch)

Manually chasing deps through Synaptic and the terminal.

Pulled the man page on dpkg --force-help and tried some variations on --configure, but my syntax skills are still lacking. So I probably wasn’t doing it right. (I’m still not really clear on how to take a raw list of switches and turn it in to something useable w/o examples.)

Did some research on the web and didn’t really see anything remotely helpful until I found the KDE/Deb maintainers page. To paraphrase:

If you’ve been playing with backports and you’ve stuck yourself in this situation then you’re on your own cheese whiz.

And I figure that’s just about what I’ve done. I’ve overwritten something that has borked the KDE dependency chain and I have no idea how to figure out exactly what it is so I can restore it / downgraded it / replace it / overwrite it with whatever version of whatever package will unbork it.

Although there was a note on the page that in testing, sometimes these kinds of things just “crop up” and get fixed when they get fixed. But, if I had to lay odds on whose foul up it was (mine or the devs) I’d give 10k-1 against it being the devs to all takers all day long and twice on Sunday.

One thing I haven’t tried is compiling from source. I haven’t really compiled anything yet. If I go this route can I make it pull in all the deps too. And if so then can you point me to a step by step by itty-bitty baby step for retarded noobs on how to do it, because I haven’t been able to find one.

Any advice on how to get myself out of this mess without starting over from scratch for the 100th time would be greatly appreciated.

[rokytnji]

Also tried variations on this w/ aptitude and w/wo -f switch)

I am kinda going through something similar (kinda sorta) with a fresh install on this old IBM computer with Antix 12 RC3 pre test final install. I needed this release because the new AntiX 12 3.5 kernel does not boot up on this box after install. So I feel your pain.

What I am doing is a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. I am fighting this right now

Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/acpi-fakekey_0.140-5_i386.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/x11-common_1%3a7.7+1_all.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/irqbalance_1.0.3-1_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

So my question is. Did you try

apt-get -f Install

To see if it cleared any errors you are getting.

Here is what I am going to try next to clear my errors

roky delete the pre-removal scripts of the troblesome .debs in /var/lib/dpkg/info

eg prerm for acpi-fakekey

Before that see if you can purge the troublecome debs

[Steven_G]

So my question is. Did you try

apt-get -f Install

To see if it cleared any errors you are getting.

I *think* I tried that one. Maybe not, it was getting late and my brains were scambled. I'll try it when I get home just to be sure.

I'll also try:

sudo apt-get remove -f

I've had that help unbork screwy dep trees while I was fiddle monkeying with stuff and I just realised that I *didn't* try it last night. I'll also try it with aptitude. I've run in to some situations where it does a better job at resolving deps than apt-get.

[rokytnji]

Shoot Take a look at my 3 ring circus.

antiX-forum - View topic - rcu_sched self-detected stall on CPU { 0} (t=15000 jiffies)

I am going through this because of special circumstances. The pre release iso I used has a broken dpkg.

[Steven_G]

I gave up on mine. I'll have to start over *again*. I did learn a lot though. And I did actually make quite a bit of progress. As far as I can tell everything should actually work, But it just won't. I found a bunch of tricks and licks for resolving broken deps and pulled in a ton of packages in the process. I even built all the deps for KDE. And when I run dep resolve utils like dpkg -C or dpkg --configure -a or apt-get / aptitude install (-m -f) or build-dep kde-full (and a lot of others - don't have my notes with me) they all come back with no errors. But, when I try to install KDE I still get error messages saying that I have broken deps caused by held packages. I've drilled down through the dep tree and used switches to unhold all held packages and after I get about 6 layers deep it will stop returning a specific broken package and just say that I have held broken packages.

But, I saw over the weekend the UB just put out a point release on 12.04LTS. I'll try that when I get home, see if it's any more stable than the original release; since no matter what I do I can't get straight up Deb7 to install on this thing.