Hi guys. I have a fairly old debian distribution running on the linux Kernel 2.6.18-4-686 and I did something silly which has broken multiple packages. I use the manual package installation command (sudo dpkg -i filename.deb) to install a single package (gcc base) however I did this using the latest version of the package which seems to have broken my GCC package completely and I am unable to compile c++ anymore.

When I now load the Synaptic Package Manager it tells me that I have 10 broken packages and when I use the fix feature it tells me I need to update other packages to fix the depencies (it selects almost every single package on my system to be removed at this point!!!).

I cant change the system too much because the software packages are set up specifically to run a certain application and I don't want to change anything incase I make it stop working!

So my question is this:

If I go to the synaptic Package Manager and uninstall the broken packages (they are all gcc related), will I be able to use the aptitude command to install GCC again? If so will it automatically install the version of GCC that will work with my system? or will it try and install the latest version and then update the rest of my system?

Best regards, aatwo.

I don't think you'll want to uninstall gcc-related packages, more packages are likely to depend on these gcc packages that are currently marked broken;

I guess the "safest" would be to downgrade the gcc-base back to the same version it was before.
(I'm not an expert however, even though I do use debian myself as well)