I'm using red hat 9.0. I found some articles talking about this thing called apt-get. To move the story along I did

# apt-get update
.
.
.
# apt-get dist-upgrade


I did this once, and everything seemed to work o.k. so I tried it again to see what would happen after it finished. I got the following error:

[root@Valinor archives]# apt-get -f install
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
aspell aspell-compat pspell-compat pspell12
The following packages will be upgraded
aspell
The following packages will be REPLACED:
pspell (by pspell12, aspell)
The following NEW packages will be installed:
aspell-compat pspell-compat pspell12
1 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 1 replaced, 0 removed and 15 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/3532kB of archives.
After unpacking 2018kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Committing changes...
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
file /usr/lib/libpspell-impl.so.6.0.0 conflicts between attempted installs of pspell-compat-0.12.2-0.ximian.4 and
pspell12-0.12.2-16.fdr.2.rh90
file /usr/lib/libpspell-modules.so.1.0.1 conflicts between attempted installs of pspell-compat-0.12.2-0.ximian.4 and pspell12-0.12.2-16.fdr.2.rh90
file /usr/lib/libpspell.so.4.0.3 conflicts between attempted installs of pspell-compat-0.12.2-0.ximian.4 and pspell12-0.12.2-16.fdr.2.rh90
E: Error while running transaction


I should mention that I went to the /var/cache/apt/archives and manually installed as many of the rpms as I could, and that is why you see the apt-get -f install there.

any help would be appreciated. Thanks

i'm not sure with RH, but with suse, apt-get likes a clean system to begin with, meaning if you installed a load of rpm's before using apt-get, you might have installed some things that would conflict with packages that apt-get would install...

I did it! It took a while but just in case anyone runs into the same problem as I did then here is what I did.

I went to where the rpms where stored and forced the installs.

# cd /var/cache/apt/archives
# rpm -Uvh --force *.rpm

Then I ran a check to see what dependencies and what not got hosed up.

# apt-get check

When I saw the list (it was pretty big) I went one by one and removed them, i.e.
it said file <'qt$'> had multiple installs, so I did a

# rpm -qa | grep qt

to find all the installs, and then removed the one I thought was the outdated one.

# rpm -e qt.outdated

After doing this for a while, I finally did an:
# apt-get check

and it told me what I needed to do,

# apt-get -f install

which I did. finally I ran

# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-update

and it ran smoothly. What a horrible way to begin!