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I was installing and uninstalling some packages on my home 11.10 system, when I suddenly noticed that dpkg and aptitude want to remove almost everything. Synaptic seems fine. At work, where I have an almost identical setup, I am NOT having this problem. From here, I thought it was a multiarch problem, but, again, the same setup at work is fine. Looksee

The only thing besides current updates that I've applied was a qdbus package, which I notice now was i386. I installed the "normal" version, which automatically uninstalled the 32-bit version, but my system is still insane.

I can't get aptitude to make sense out of the recommendations. If I use `e' to examine the solution, it starts a slow count to inifinity. If I disable multiarch, as in the other thread, then aptitude can make sense of it's own resolution, but that's still to remove thousands of packages, and free 4 GB of drive space (which is just about everything).

Is there any way to get this sorted, or am I looking at a reinstall?

UPDATE: I'm seeing various packages with status "pd". I can't find any reference that tells me what the "d" means. >-/

SECOND UPDATE: I disabled multiarch, and aptitude thought it could work things out. Despite telling me that it was going to KEEP 832 packages, it started deleting them all. SCREW IT. I'll just reinstall. I'm getting too old for this crap.

Community
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David Krider
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  • My guess is you have removed some part of the core system which all those packages are somehow dependent. You can try re-installing ubuntu-desktop, see if that resolves the problem. FWIW, it is easier to start with a minimal install and build up then it is to remove packages. And take care removing a package if you do not understand what it does. – Panther Dec 19 '11 at 21:59
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    The first thing to try is to tell Aptitude that you like your system the way it is: press : on the “New Packages” line, on the “Installed Packages” line, and on the “Not Installed Packages” line. Make another round if you still have packages marked as to-install or to-delete (they might have appeared due to conflict resolution). Does this help? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Dec 19 '11 at 22:21
  • Have you resolved your issue? – Lewis Goddard Feb 24 '12 at 21:14

1 Answers1

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(OP solved issue)

I disabled multiarch, and aptitude thought it could work things out. Despite telling me that it was going to KEEP 832 packages, it started deleting them all. I'll just re-install.

belacqua
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Ringtail
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