Okay, this is getting frustrating :( Please, if anyone has any ideas, I would really appreciate them.
I now have two computers installed from the same set of "official" slink CDs (burned from the official images). I must be doing something *really* stupid, because they are both misbehaving in exactly the same way. After some poking around in /var/lib/dpkg/available, etc, I have been able to narrow down the problem to the following: apt is only registering the availability of contrib and non-free, but not main. All the entries in "available" have either Section: contrib/xxx or Section: non-free/xxx. The procedure I went through during install is as follows (maybe I missed some step that should have been obvious...) Boot from first CD, go through install procedure, etc. Select tasks. Go into dselect in the install procedure. Choose multi-cd as the method. Select the paths. Update list of packages. Skip the select page, and go straight to install. Answer all the packages questions. Do the configure and remove steps, just in case. Quit dselect. Use the system (it works fine at this point - all the packages are there) do apt-get update - appears to work fine do apt-get install (anything in main) "no installation candidate" do apt-get install (anything in contrib/non-free) [usually] "unmet dependencies" Going into dselect and changing the method to "apt acquisition" makes no difference. Changing the sources.list lines to say unstable instead of stable also makes no difference. Here are the exact lines from sources.list on one of the computers: deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable non-US Thank you in advance for any help, Stuart.
