[vox-tech] apt-get problem

[Norm Matloff]

I have a Dell netbook, fortunately bought when Windows was available
only as an extra-price option, and fortunately bought when Dell offered
netbooks without hard drives.  (HDs add a bit of weight and drain more
than a bit of battery power, and aren't needed for netbooks, in my
view.)

The machine came with Ubuntu 8.04 installed, and I haven't upgraded.  I
recently installed the new version of R, 2.10.0 using apt-get, and the
installation went fine except for a message which went something like,
"Inconsistency found in your packages.  Would you like this to be
fixed?"  Innocently I answered yes, and found that what it did was to
restore the old R, 2.6.2 or something like that. :-(  So, I re-installed
2.10.0, this time ignoring the warning message.

The result is that R is fine but apt-get is not.  Any time I try to
download anything with apt-get (or Synaptic, which I assume is a
wrapper), it gives me that same error message, and refuses to do the
install.

Any ideas out there?

Norm