Yes indeed an interesting setup.
Post output of;
Code:
cat /etc/apt/sources.list
The most interesting thing about the -f output was the "447" not upgraded. That is a lot of packages to not be the version your package manager (dpkg) thinks that they ought to be.
There are currently 4 versions of Debian available;
Squeeze-LTS
Stable (Wheezy)
testing (Jessie)
Sid (unstable)
If you follow the Debian recommendations you do not mix repositories for Stable with anything else. This is because the packages are to far apart in age. Squeeze packages are more than 2 years older than Wheezy packages are. Wheezy packages are about 2 years older than Sid packages.
Those are repos querried in your "apt-get update" output. Squeeze packages will rarely be compatible with Sid pacages. Wheezy uses sysvinit for initiation and Sid uses the Debian implementation of systemd so sooner or later you are going to break your system completely if you don't do some serious clean up.
I am sure that your system is set to prefer the highest version of all packages. That means that you are putting Sid packages which currently are the unstable versions of packages meant for Jessie into a base Squeeze install.
Without seeing your sources.list yet I can assume that is the case. This will make cleaning up your system very complex. You would need to get Sid out of the repo and then remove all packages from that source. There are thousands of packages in your install. Then you should be able to remove Squeeze from the sources.list and do a version upgrade to Wheezy.
This may sound fairly straight foreward and simple. It is not but it is tedious and complex. If you worked at it daily full time it should take less than a week. And then most likely fail.
Why? Because you are trying to revert your Debian version. Removing the newer packages will undoubtedly remove, for instance, the currently installed dpkg leaving you with no way to manage packages.
The only thing you really have a chance at is to get rid of Squeeze and Wheezy in your sources.list and then run update, upgrade and dist-upgrade with only sid repos. This might upgrade your version to Sid. This will probably not work either because you really don't have all the packages you should have to upgrade from.
If you are installed with a separate /home partition you could easily reinstall (backing up all that data first to be safe) and simply telling the installer not to format /home.
If you are installed on one partition, just / (root) you should create another partition for just data and put all your data in it. Putting this on a different drive would be a good idea.
You need to reinstall one way or another. This really could be dealt with without doing that but it will take a very long time and basically require you to completely reinstall your system a bit at a time while removing most of it first.
I have run unstable versions for a long time. I enjoy it. I am pretty good at fixing them when they break. I might be able to fix a system like yours. I wouldn't bet on it but I would give it a whack. For the fun of it. Because I am not that stable myself probably.
To recommend that you try to fix this is not a responcible thing to do. Reinstall.
If you do, try using just one version of Debian. Wheezy has backports you could add to the repo but that is not really recommended by Debian either. If you do that it doesn't fit the Debian definition of Stable.
Compared to what you currnetly have though that would be extremely stable. For that matter Jessie is now in freeze. This means they are bug hunting for the new release. Packages are at their nominal release version. It would be another option for you if you, for some reason, want the latest and greatest packages instead of older more stable packages like you would get in Wheezy.
I would not recommend Squeeze-LTS at this point. The LTS business is just being trialed in Squeeze. If it is continued then Wheezy will go to LTS too. If not you will still have 1 year of Wheezy support after the release of Jessie.
Install on more than one partition. It makes recovery much easier.
But, for the entertainment value and the possibility that someone may think of a cure, lets see the sources.list.
A couple other commands you may find interesting are;
will give you statistics on your packages. The one you may find interesting is the first one which is a count of unique package names which is the number of total installed packages and looks like this;
Code:
root@lounge:/home/sam# apt-cache stats
Total package names: 58467 (1,169 k)
There is a lot more given but that one is easy to understand.
[code]
apt-cache policy <package name>
[/cache}
Will show the versions of any package available on your system as defined by your sources.list which should be interesting. Looks something like this;
Code:
root@lounge:/home/sam# apt-cache policy xfce4
xfce4:
Installed: 4.10.1
Candidate: 4.10.1
Version table:
*** 4.10.1 0
500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
root@lounge:/home/sam# apt-cache policy libreoffice
libreoffice:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 1:4.3.3-1
Version table:
1:4.4.0~alpha2-1 0
1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental/main amd64 Packages
1:4.3.3-1 0
500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid/main amd64 Packages
Explaination;
Note at the very bottom the source for the packages is defined. One from the experimental repo (don't even think of putting this in your sources.list) and one from the sid repo. Installed is the one from experimental.
That command should give you a pretty good idea of how screwed up your Squeeze install is particularly if you go through all the major packages of your install.
Some people, I hope you are not one, might take this as negative criticism. It is not intended that way at all.
I broke and reinstalled my first Linux install only 5 times the first 7 days I had it. Kind of proud of that. Learned an awful lot. To bad yours didn't break down faster so you could have learned faster. But breaking systems is a skill at which I excell.
I have taken to leaving comments in my installs, in the fstab file and the sources.list. This install of Sid is, along with a testing install that shares the same /home partition, my production OS. I have another Sid install whose partitions are labeled VictimeR and VictimH, which is intended for experimentation. The one I am now has this in the sources.list;
Code:
## This is Lounge Lizard the co-main use OS. Don't screw it up!
I try to folow that instruction.
I also have both Squeeze and Wheezy installed, agian sharing a /home partition. They are there for if I suceed in breaking both my testing and Sid "real" installs. The instructions in their sources.list is a bit more emphatic.
You learn a lot faster if you are not scared to screw up a system. You just need to, if you intend to do "interesting" (OK so they may be stupid) things, learn to have a backup install to fall back on. You probably have more sense than I do so you probably don't need as many layers of backup installs.
Problem with Locale and Gvfs:amd64 & dpkg
