apt issues

[Kethinov]

Hiya.
In a new hdd install of Knoppix 3.3, apt won't cooperate. The sources.list was huge and apt-get update caused tons of 404 errors; no there's nothing wrong with my connection.

I shrank it to a single source, deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free and it apt-get updated properly. But then I tired to apt-get install gnome and it yelled at me saying it depended on gnome-desktop-environment.

Err... I thought the whole point of apt-get was to automatically resolve these kinds of dependencies?

Anyway I kept adding stuff it depended on to the apt-get statement until it finally started downloading GNOME which I am doing now.

How can I reconfigure apt so that when I tell it to apt-get something like this in the future it automatically resolves all those dependencies?

[Durand Hicks]

Hi,

Have you read the apt-get/dpkg tutorial that is made sticky at the top of this or the general forum? If you need to check to see if a package will install without problems, you type:

apt-get -s install -t testing gnome

to get gnome from testing,

apt-get -s install -t unstable gnome

to get gnome from unstable. This is known as apt-pinning. IOW, you're telling apt-get to get packages from testing and resolve with stable versions if needed (option #1), or get packages from unstable and resolve with testing versions if needed. (option #2). Without the -t (testing or unstable) option, you're just telling apt-get to get whatever recent package it can find without checking the resolves to a prior version. But don't take my word for it, search google for apt-get and you should get a ton of hits about it.