i removed the vim-tiny with sudo appitude remove vim and then tried reinstalling the vim full but it seems that the package is obsoleted.

shortcasper@shortcasper-laptop:/usr/local/download$ sudo apt-get install vim
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package vim is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package vim has no installation candidate
shortcasper@shortcasper-laptop:/usr/local/download$

Is Ubuntu 8.10 still supported?
Usually an obsolete package is tagged that because it's no longer needed, by your system.
Meaning that your sources.list may have changed.
That is only my opinion though.

This also means package name may have change

Have you tried looking for it in Synaptic?