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apt dependency problems - firefox

Hello,

I am running Debian 3.1 and I'm trying to install a newer version of firefox using apt-get install. Unfortunately, there appears to be some sort of a dependency problem. I thought that apt would automatically take care of dependencies, but this was not the case.

I issue this command to install firefox:
sudo apt-get install firefox

This results in the following output:

Code:

Reading Package Lists... Done

Building Dependency Tree... Done

You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

  firefox: Depends: iceweasel (>= 2.0.0.4-0etch1) but it is not going to be installed

          Depends: iceweasel (< 2.0.0.4-0etch1.1~) but it is not going to be installed

  libc6-dev: Depends: libc6 (= 2.3.2.ds1-22sarge4) but 2.3.6.ds1-13 is to be installed

  libncurses5-dev: Depends: libncurses5 (= 5.4-4) but 5.5-5 is to be installed

  locales: Depends: glibc-2.3.2.ds1-22sarge4

E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

Unfortunately, using the -f option does not help. It results in the same output.

What might cause apt-get to fail this way? How can I resolve this?

Can you post the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list?

It sounds to me like you installed Debian 3.1 (Sarge) and your sources.list is pointing to "stable" branch. Well, a few months ago, Sarge became "oldstable" and Etch became "stable". So you might be trying to install firefox from Etch, but the rest of your system is currently Sarge. So it's barfing because some of your libraries are older and iceweasel (firefox) depends on newer libraries, but the newer libraries depend on other things that aren't on your system, so it just quits with error.

Thanks for the help, I didn't even think of that. I am running sarge, and my sources.list is pointing towards stable.

I'll probably run apt-get -u dist-upgrade now and see how that goes.

That's one reason why one of the first things I always do is to change the branch name to the codename (i.e. when I upgraded to etch, I changed all the "stable" instances in sources.list to "etch").

It's always safer to do a fresh install rather than a dist-upgrade.

The dangers may be fewer than they used to be, but I would still never do a dist-upgrade other than w/ a willingness to lose everything & start over -- w/ that fresh install I am recommending :).