I am very frustrted. I have not been able to install a single program using apt. I tried to install gaim, one of many packages. Here is the output.

-su-2.05b# apt-get install gaim
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Note, selecting gaim-gnome instead of gaim
Package gaim-gnome is a virtual package provided by:
You should explicitly select one to install.
E: Package gaim-gnome has no installation candidate



Here is a copy of my sources.list file

-su-2.05b# cat sources.list

#deb http://penguinppc.org/~daniels/sid/i386 ./
#deb http://people.debian.org/~fpeters/gnome2.4/ ./
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib
#deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib
# deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free


what the heck am i doing wrong???
I know there was an attack on Debians site and that packages.debian.org is down. Does that have anything to do with this insanity. As you can assume, i am new to debian, however i have used apt many times before with RH and Suse.

try

apt-cache search gaim

it should give you a list of packages concerning gaim. Maybe just type the correct name

Have you done
apt-get update before?

i have done apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade several times, and with different sources as well. Every time i do that, it tells me there are no packages to upgrade, or that i need dependencies, but it doesnt download them. It was my understanding that apt would download and install your dependencies if you need them.

yes, it is apt's usual behavior. Sometimes it isn' t though.

have you tried apt-get install gaim-gnome?

or apt-cache search gaim?