Apt is misbehaving
My "apt" and "dpkg" seem to be very confused.
I just finally got hold of a slink Official CD set and installed it on
my new computer. The installation process went off with hardly a hitch -
a first for me with Debian ;) What follows is pretty much the first
thing I tried to do after finishing installing and getting X set up.
The problems started when I tried to use Apt to start the slow process
of upgrading to potato (I'm on a modem, so I'm going to do it bit by
bit... just the packages I want).
I edited /etc/apt/sources.list to change "stable" to "unstable" wherever
it appeared, and also added the gnome-stage-2 url (I don't mind a bit of
instability, but I do want to be able to show off gnome). Just out of
curiosity, I typed apt-get update; apt-get -s dist-upgrade to see
exactly how huge a download would be needed if I were to try to do it
all at once. Apt told me that only two packages would be
upgraded/installed - Glib and Gtk 1.2. How strange, I thought, and went
to bed.
The next day I tried to do some real upgrading, so I tried doing apt-get
install on an actual package (the package for netscape 4.51). Apt told
me it couldn't install it because it had broken dependencies, and listed
them for me. After spending a while trying to chase them manually down
to the root, I gave up.
I thought apt might have been out of date, so I tried apt-get install
apt. "Sorry, apt is already at the latest version". Wrong! The website
lists the current version as 0.3.4, I have 0.1.9.
I looked at dselect, and noticed that every single package on my system
is listed as an "obsolete/local package". This seems like an Important
Clue to me, but I have no idea what it means.
These are all the things I can think of to do. I've tried various
"clean" options to apt and dpkg, and they all return without problems,
but don't change anything.
Any help would be much appreciated. Apt is one of the few programs I've
*never* had a problem with before (although I've also never installed
from a CD before - always floppies+apt).
Thank you very much for your time,
Stuart.
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