KDE problems

[Richard Heller <rheller@prime.cs.ohiou.edu>]

Hi,

I somehow managed to get things in an annoying state.  I've been trying to
install kde.  I got the .deb files from the kde site and tried to install
them.  Somewhere along the line things got screwed up.  I had the wrong
version of qt installed (I had 1.40 and kde required 1.42) so things
wouldn't configure.  I couldn't find qt1.42 so I decided to delete the kde
packages.  Now kdebase refuses to go away.  When I use dselect, it has an
"I" in the installed state field and it insists on trying to remove it
(which fails every time).  If I try to tell it to install kdebase (which I
hoped would just overwrite the old one) it gets very confused.  When I
select kdebase, it goes to the dependency window.  Even though I have
everything selected for install (which is what it says it wants) when I
try to leave the dependency window it just jumps right back in.  The only
way to get out of the dependency window is to deselect everything.

I can no longer install anything through dselect because it's dead set on
trying to remove kdebase.  How to I tell it to quit trying to remove
kdebase?

When I run dpkg from the command line to remove kdebase, I get the
following output:

(Reading database ... 55600 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing kdebase ...
dpkg - warning: while removing kdebase, directory `/etc/kde' not empty so
not removed.
chmod: /etc/menu-methods/kde: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing kdebase (--remove):
 subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 kdebase


Thanks,
Rich