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Context: My laptop's battery died. Upon resetting the machine, the audio did not work. I tried to kill pulseaudio and use commands from Ask Ubuntu, but these methods did not fix the issue. I then uninstalled pulseaudio, and tried to re-install it, which returned the following error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 pulseaudio : Depends: libpulse0 (= 1:8.0-0ubuntu3) but 1:8.0-0ubuntu3.7 is to be installed
              Depends: pulseaudio-utils but it is not going to be installed
              Recommends: pulseaudio-module-x11 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Given that I got into this weird system state by randomly typing in commands, I wanted to figure out a "first-principles" approach to solving this issue. What should be my first attempt here?

foreverclimbing
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1 Answers1

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I was able to resolve the issue by using aptitude to uninstall libpulse0. This uninstalled a large number of dependencies. I was then unable to login, so I logged in directly to the terminal and re-installed ubuntu-desktop and libpulse0, which fixed all issues.

To any users encountering similar issues regarding dependencies, I would recommend using aptitude, which provides a helpful plan for resolving them.

foreverclimbing
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