Can someone help me with this problem:

I have libncurses5 version 5.5-1 (unstable) installed. I am honestly not sure when or how I got hold of it, because it is not in any of the repositories I use.

However, I now have a problem when I try to run make menuconfig to configure a new kernel. It requests libncurses-dev, which I do not have, and the one my repositories points to is the latest stable version (5.4-4), in other words an older version.

I have tried
apt-get install libncurses5
to replace my libncurses with the the version 5.4-4 stable. However it refuses to do the job and gives me the message "latest version already installed" or something to that effect.

What can I do to get the older stable version installed?

Ari

Download the .deb's and use dpkg -i file.deb file1.deb. First thing I would do though is make sure the rest of your install has not been upgraded from the stable install by checking whether libc6 is still at the stable version.

Thanks for the suggestion. As it turns out there was reason to check the version of libc6. It is listed as version 2.3.5-8, whereas the latest stable version is 2.3.2.something as far as I can see.

What possible courses of action does this leave me with?

Well your now pretty much running testing/etch then anyways (its at 2.3.6.. now but was at 2.3.5 once) so you probably should dist-upgrade to that version before you do though check to see what you have installed for the X server if you have Xorg 6.9 installed then you will probably want to purge that first before upgrading then install the packages that were removed again.

I guess I have my work cut out for me now!

I will try a dist-upgrade as you suggest, but I have some other things I need to do first. It will have to wait a few days.

Thanks a lot for your help!