[vox-tech] apt-get problem

[Alex Mandel]

Norm Matloff wrote:
> 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
> 

This is fairly odd, I have R 2.10 installed on an 8.04 machine via the
package manager. I would open up synaptic, make sure to reload the
package lists from the web, and then go an have a look at the R packages.
There may be a preference set to use official packages, you may need to
change that to latest packages. Also you might try forcing the package
version. If you do that an upgrade should resolve any remaining issues
and ignore R for those purposes.

Alex