Thanks David, worked great. The dselect manual for beginners should definitely have this information. For some reason the manual assumes dselect will handle any and all installing and configuing. I'll leave David's response for manual maintainer. Dean
> Presumably you have a lot of .deb files in /var/cache/apt/archives/ > so just (as root) type > dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*deb > and see how it gets on. When it's finished, you might try > dpkg --configure --pending > and you can repeat that until there's no change. > Then type > dpkg -l | less and look for lines not starting ii (type > /!^ii > press return and type n about four times to get past the preamble). > You might then use dselect to refetch just those packages.
