Packages wedged in sarge -> etch upgrade ( and apt-get vs. aptitude)

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

Trying to up grade a laptop from sarge to etch.  First tried apt-get
dist-upgrade and then tried aptitude dist-upgrade.

Both are stopping when trying to install mozilla-mplayer, it seems:

Aptitude reports:

    Errors were encountered while processing:
     mozilla-mplayer

    $ sudo apt-get -f dist-upgrade

    174 upgraded, 63 newly installed, 6 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
    1 not fully installed or removed.
    Need to get 0B/87.6MB of archives.
    After unpacking 89.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
    Extracting templates from packages: 100%
    Preconfiguring packages ...
    (Reading database ... 34703 files and directories currently installed.)
    Unpacking mplayer (from .../mplayer_1.0~rc1-12etch_i386.deb) ...
    dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mplayer_1.0~rc1-12etch_i386.deb (--unpack):
     trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mplayer', which is also in package mplayer-586
    dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
    Errors were encountered while processing:
     /var/cache/apt/archives/mplayer_1.0~rc1-12etch_i386.deb
    E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Any way to tell it to skip or remove mplayer for now?


Second question -- why does running Aptitude download additional
packages compared with apt-get dist-upgrade?  Do they calculate
dependencies differently?  Seems like there should only be one
dependency tree for the packages I have installed.



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org