dependency errors during installation of programs in mandrake.
 

I tried installing valknut,scilab etc for my mandriva 10.2 linux distribution.For the valknut case it said unsatisfied libdc.so.0 so i tried downloading from a mirror and installing ..then the urpmi crashed.this is very repetitive and very irritating.similarly for the scilab it said it needed certain fortran libraries and the same problem ensued.
Is there an easy alternative to solving dependency errors than just switching my distro(to say debian where apt-get apparently solves the problem.)

The question is, why is urpmi crashing? Do you get any error messages when it crashes. Have you tried updating your system or changing your mirrors? Urpmi is similar to apt, so i don't think I would switch distro just for that. You can also use apt on Mandriva and other rpm based distros.