I'm running Debian Etc, kernel 2.6.8-17, I think. Running KDE 3.5. I trying to install and run Bibletime. I keep getting broken packages. It tracking them down I come to xfree86-common. While it will install, it removes the KDE envirenment totally. Is there a work around other than not using Bibletime?

Not sure, but there's a package in the Debian repositories for both Sarge and Sid, but not Etch. So you could dist-upgrade to unstable and use it.

http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/s...ll&release=all

OK, next dumb question.....how do i do the upgrade to unstable? While I know what I know well, I don't know how to do that.

As root, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Change every "etch" or "testing" to "sid" (or "unstable", it doesn't really matter which you use). Then save the file and exit.

From there, go to a command line and as root type aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade. Beware that your desktop may be less stable than it was for etch. But probably not any worse than using Fedora or Ubuntu. I've run unstable on the desktop before, and it was really mostly pretty stable. Every once in a while a package would break. But give it a week and it'll be sorted out.

I guess there is another option -- something called apt-pinning. I'm not real familiar with how to set it up, but basically it would allow you to keep etch mostly and just install a few packages from unstable to run your program. If you want to try this, I'd google and search these forums as I won't be much help to you...

I guess that the package "xfree86-common" keeps getting you into problems because it is not part of testing (etch) or unstable (sid). At least I couldn't find it on my Debian Testing laptop.

Both etch and sid use xorg, and the package "xfree86-common" is part of older XFree86. So if you try to install it will probably try to remove xorg and all packages that rely on it, namely KDE. I'd check the file /etc/apt/sources.list to see that you you have only stable OR testing repositories enabled at the same time, not both.

You could upgrade to sid, but remember that downgrading from unstable to testing or from testing to stable is not easy. So if you want stability, stick with etch and install Bibletime from sources. It's not that hard, just install the missing dependencies with apt when the "configure" script complains about them.