problem with aptitude/synaptic

[chameleon_789]

I tried installing alsa with synaptic a couple of days ago, and now whenever I try to install/upgrade/remove a package with either aptitude or synaptic it tries to uninstall 100's of other packages (gnome, gde, kde, xserver, loads of libraries, etc). How can I fix this without reinstalling debian completely?

[Vergil83]

a few questions...

Are you running sarge, etch, sid?
what kernel are you running (uname -a)?
how did you install alsa (this depends on kernel 2.4 vs kernel 2.6)?
have you tried to run apt-get -f install?

[gabriel_007]

Actually I have a similar problem with "stable".
When I run aptitude update/upgrade (with only main and security repositories activated), aptitude wants to remove: xfonts-base xfonts-scalable xlibmesa-dri xserver-xfree86
and upgrade: gpdf libnspr4 libnss3 libtiff-tools libtiff4 mozilla-browser mozilla-psm

Erm, I know xserver-xfree86 is rather crucial for the system and I don't have xorg or anything else to replace it. Synaptic doesn't want to remove these packages, but there is an error while upgrading through it.

What should I do?

[chameleon_789]

I gave up and reinstalled debian

But just for the record, I was using 2.6.8-3-386 sarge, and installed alsa through synaptic (no configuration screen or anything of the sort came up though). I think alsa may have removed a couple of conflicting packages but I don't know what they were, nothing that would have broken any other packages though as far as I'm aware.