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 I thought apt might have been out of date, so I tried apt-get install apt.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.
