Several apt-get questions

Hi,

I have Knoppix 06/06/03 installed on my HD.
I promise I've read the tutorial and HOWTO, but
still apt-get is giving me headaches. Judging
from the amount of posts dedicated to this
very subject on this site, it looks like I
am in good company! Rather than flooding the
board with different smaller questions, I
thought I'd regroup them here.

[1] I've been able to install small, mostly
stand-alone packages like pdksh, aptitude, ispell
or synaptic. But things get much more confusing
for less trivial stuff - say anything KDE-related.
Eg, for quanta or kscreensaver, I get either
a notice that the package looks broken, that
it depends on this or that which is not going to
be installed, or that it wants to upgrade libraries
as vital as libc6 or libstdc++5 or even seemingly
completely unrelated subsystems. I understand this
is probably a consequence of the bleedind-edge
nature of this debian mutant into which Klaus has
expertly mixed all the available released packages.
Still, if somebody has important general guidelines
to provide to ease upgrading, I'd be grateful to
hear it. More specific questions follow:

[2] other posts tell horror stories about using
"apt-get dist-upgrade". Is "upgrade" any safer?
Reading the manpage leaves me under the opposite
impressin. Hmm... am I right in assuming "upgrade"
will try to upgrade individual packages to the latest
level available within their installed release (stable,
testing, instable), whereas "dist-upgrade" tries to move
everything to the default release (hence testing with
the default knoppix apt.conf) ?

[3] what's the safest way to upgrade to kde 3.1.3?
Does it entail upgrading libc/libstdc++ and has it
broken anyone's system?

[4] what's the safest way to install gnome 2.2?
Alongside a working KDE, that is! I remember reading
posts by KK swearing it had become impossible to have
both GUI frameworks working together (at least after
the initial KDE 3.1.2 release and given the CD space
constraints). At the lower levels they have to rely
on system libs where it's easy to foresee conflicting
requirements...

[5] synaptic tells me it cannot open the stock sources.list
If I replace this file with a simpler one which just
contains non-source packages from a mirror nearby, all is
fine. If I simply remove the commented lines from the default
knoppix sources.list, all looks good as well - what gives?

Of course no one is expected to have all the answers,
so please contribute what you can. Thanks in advance.

I have a generic answer but...it may help you
You may try this analgesic for headches

http://www.mepis.org/

this is a live-cd very much like knoppix but after HD installation apt-get works smoothly, it is is like a miracle :lol:

Although I'd rather stick with knoppix, mepis looks interesting indeed.
When used as a live cd, does it support boot-time parameters ("cheatcodes")
to select an alternate keyboard or resolution, etc ?
I am also intrigued by the second CD; I take it it is only useful when
installing to disk? Does it hold plain .deb packages which could possibly
be installed from knoppix as well?

kde is somewhat a problem in debian as well as knoppix, but knoppix is more complicated since it uses stable, testing, and unstable packages. If you run into apt-get problems with knoppix try this apt-get command option:

apt-get -t unstable install package-name

the -t option forces apt-get to only use that one repository in this case unstable

allways do apt-get -s upgrade and apt-get -s dist-upgrade and simulate the upgrades and see what exacly will be done I usually pipe those commands to less so I can scroll through the listing. Apt-get upgrade will upgrade packages but not systgem dependencies like libraries etc. dist-upgrade upgrades everything. I just upgraded my kde 3.1.1 systems to kde 3.1.3 a couple of days ago, if I did a dist-upgrade a bunch of packages would have been removed, so I upgraded kde by itself by doing an apt-get install kdebase (or kdebase-bin) everything was OK here, but then I installed kdemultimedia and kde graphics and I ran into a problem, a file in kdemultimedia is in two packages so dpkg errors out. So I change directory to /var/cache/apt/archives and then use the following command:

dpkg -i --force overwrite kdemultimedia-kio-plugins_4%3a3.1.3-0woody1_i386.deb

dpkg had given me an error trying to install kdemultimedia-kio-plugins because a file was in it as well as kioslave.

Note: you have to use the full name with dpkg, I usually use dpkg from an xterminal so I can use my mouse to cut and paste.

HTH on a couple of your apt-get issues.

~rock