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---UPDATE

Unfortunately, there was not much to be done with this issue. There is no 'easy fix'. I ended up reinstalling ubuntu. A bit radical, but it worked.

---END UPDATE

I messed up my packages in ubuntu 22.04 when trying to install ffmpeg5 to use alvr, following this guide - https://launchpad.net/~savoury1/+archive/ubuntu/ffmpeg5. One of the steps is dist-upgrade, which happened to delete ubuntu-desktop (I didn't know how risky it was).

Once I fixed having no desktop, most things are working, except steam (missing i386 packages). When trying to install missing i386 packages, I realized that I can't upgrade without errors anymore. I'm beyond my understanding of what went wrong, and I'm afraid of screwing something else up in the process. Below are the outputs of apt-upgrade, me trying to remove one of the packages, and running aptitude safe-upgrade :

apt upgrade output:

$sudo apt upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  gcc-12-base:i386 libatomic1:i386 libcurl4:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libexpat1:i386 libgcc-s1:i386 libjbig0:i386 libobjc-11-dev libobjc4 libpcre2-8-0:i386
  libpixman-1-0:i386 libpulse0:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386 libssl3:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libsystemd0:i386 libtiff5:i386 libudev1:i386 libwayland-client0:i386
  libwayland-cursor0:i386 libwayland-egl1:i386 libwayland-server0:i386 zlib1g:i386
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded.

Trying to remove one of the held-back packages

$sudo apt remove gcc-12-base:i386 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
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:
 libcrypt1:i386 : Depends: libc6:i386 (>= 2.25) but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

Trying to solve via aptitude, which recommends full-resolver, which gives a very complicated result (pasted below).

$sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
Resolving dependencies...                
Unable to resolve dependencies for the upgrade: no solution found.
Unable to safely resolve dependencies, try running with --full-resolver.

Complete output, which is a bit scary (I see it will remove an nvidia package, which always is a pain) https://pastebin.com/vJkMdE7C

Drew75
  • 133
  • I removed the ppa. How can I identify the offending software? FFmpeg is not installed, and I can't remove any of the "held back" packages... – Drew75 Nov 29 '22 at 22:19
  • Run sudo apt update to refresh the list of available software, then then sudo apt upgrade to bring your system up-to-date. If there are still held back packages, you can attempt to install them manually with sudo apt install packagename until sudo apt upgrade comes back clean – Nmath Nov 29 '22 at 22:36
  • I was able to remove most of the held-back packages, except two: gcc-12-base:i386 libgcc-s1:i386. They cannot be re-installed or removed... the specific error is already posted in my question, under "Trying to remove one of the held-back packages". – Drew75 Nov 30 '22 at 13:54
  • apt gives me a list of about 100 dependencies to check... It seems simpler to do a full reinstall of Ubuntu, since I'm fully backed up. – Drew75 Dec 01 '22 at 06:42
  • There is normally no need to remove held back packages. Mostly they are held back due to phased updates, don't mess with these packages, just be patient, they will be upgraded at a later point. – mook765 Dec 03 '22 at 06:45
  • The issue wasn't only that the packages were held back, but that it completely prevented me from installing any other software. There were many borked installed and unmet dependencies that couldn't be resolved. – Drew75 Dec 03 '22 at 06:54

0 Answers0