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I am trying to download kcachegrind after a reinstallation of my OS. But I keep getting "dependency" failures. I have tried going through the Ubuntu software manager (which worked perfectly before...) and Synaptic. With synaptic, I got specific package failures and when I searched for the packages I got more package dependencies. After the 5th time of this I gave up because there must be something else going on.

Please help?

ad3l1n3
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1 Answers1

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Open a terminal and try this:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get clean

sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo dpkg --configure -a

sudo apt-get install -f
Ringtail
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    Hey! That worked! Can you please explain what you did? – ad3l1n3 Feb 26 '12 at 23:41
  • @ad3l1n3 the apt-gets: update downloads info on whether there are updates available. clean removes downloaded installation packages that were cached. autoremove uninstalls packages that were once needed for other packages (without the user specifying/knowing about them) but now nothing needs them anymore. upgrade installs the newest version of each package. (Personally think this is not the best idea to do here.) install -f attempts to fix any broken dependencies between packages. the dpkg one: --configure -a installs packages that were already unpacked but not finished installing. – n611x007 Mar 27 '15 at 19:46
  • @ad3l1n3 the way to get these information is to open a terminal and type man apt-get and man dpkg (you can see a pattern here..). once you are inside the man program, you quit with typing :q - you search with typing / then your searchterm then enter - you jump back and forward between results of search with n and N. – n611x007 Mar 27 '15 at 19:48
  • I think upgrade -ing the system which will install the newest one from each package is an overkill and a dangerous one. Consider bandwith usage on a limited connection, disk space usage on an over critically stuffed disk, relying on features that may inadvertedly change via the upgrade - even if package maintainer tries to avoid this, new is not always better, and old is not always better either. Doing an upgrade to fix dependency problems may arguably be just one step towards cargo cult system administration – n611x007 Mar 27 '15 at 20:12