Quote Originally Posted by rusty
Right.

I ran dselect and realized that it's writing back to sources.lst. So I've managed to get dselect to obtain a list pf packages and I kind of like the way it reports dependency conflicts as I scroll down.
That explains the line in there.

I'm not sure I need to manually insatll each package, I'm guessing that many of the dependency issues will involve one of the lib files so I might start there.
Yes that is usually where the problem is either an extra package that needs to be installed or it is trying to install the version from testing when the unstable is needed.

Since dselect lets me add sources, I might try that although cutting and pasting from your post is enticing.
Well you need the sources somewhere in the equation to be able to get the packages needed so you have to figure out which way you want to do it.

Is this a good time to try and apt-get synaptic - does it have any depency resolution tools?

Thanks again.
The last time I used it (a year ago) sometimes it wanted to remove half the system I think that has to do with the mix of sources that are in Knoppix though not really anything to do with synaptic so you are most likely still going to run into problems with a mixed sources.list. I prefer apt-get it just gets the job done and you have control of what is happening, another package you may want to look into is aptitude it is a front-end for apt with similar features to dselect IIRC.