It seems to be a Debian way of life for deb packages to conflict (and thereby not install).


If the conflicting packages are both needed, is there a way to "merge" them nicely (ie unpack the .deb files and manually install their files) ?

I don't mean to discourage you or anything, but there is very good reason why Debian does not allow conflicting packages. It all comes with the stability of debian, otherwise how different would it be from rpm based distros where you can install everything.. and override the conflicts and then crash the whole system.
I hope you get what I am trying to say. Conflicts create instability and that is not good.

First let us know which packages are causing the conflict. It might be that one of them is old (or may be they are gnome packages.. they never seem to be made right)
if you can, remove the one which is causing the conflict and then try to install the other.
If thats not possible then you definitely have the option of "extracting" files from the package and not "install" it. In which case there is good chance it wont work at all.

So let us know which ones are conflicting and things might get better.

Valerie

Actually KDE packages tend to be the ones that get in the way for me, and I prefer KDE to GNOME.

And the instability of RPM distros drove me nuts when I started using Linux.

Rebooting into another distro with another set of software packages works now, and it sounds like it might be the better option anyway.

I don't know why most Debian users have to have a go at rpm, debs have similar problems to rpm and if rpms are managed properly they don't give you the exaggerated hell that people keep mentioning. Debian tools such as apt are also available for rpm and they work more or less the same.