Apt-Get crippled

[David Baron <d_baron@012.net.il>]

For all but the simplest apt-get's, the thing will not work.

It is apparently blocked by some dependency problem centering arround alsa. 
Following the recommendation for apt-get -f install (with no target), it 
attempts to install some alsa_utilities upgrade but since there is a 
cross-reference to knx-alsa (Knoppix included a version on their distro), it 
fails. I had also installed more recent alsa manually (configure;make;make 
install)--one of the few successful installs using this method--but 
apparently not such a good idea.