In my description of the apt-get problems that arose when I installed the latest version of R, 2.10.0, I had one aspect incorrect: I did not use apt-get to download 2.10.0; that would have just gotten me version 2.6.2, which I already had and which did not have crucial features. Instead, I went to the R Web page and downloaded a .deb file for Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04, my OS). I then used gdebi to install it, getting a warning message about "inconsistencies," as I wrote yesterday, after which I could not use apt-get to download any other stuff, e.g. mplayer. R itself worked fine. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Following some of the suggestions here, this evening I used the Update Manager to update all packages. That restored the old R, 2.6.2, which is the latest version of R among my repositories (which are the ones that came with the system, no additions by me). So it didn't help. I then downloaded R from the R Web page again, by this time version 2.10.1. Interestingly, gdebi didn't give me an error message, but again apt-get refused to download anything else afterward, citing inconsistencies. Synaptic Package Manager would not even come up; instead, a little window came up saying "You have 12 broken packages on your system! Use the 'Broken' filter to locate them." Naturally, I declined. I then followed the suggestion to use aptitude. This turned out to solve my problem, as it organized the information better (especially from my point of view, as I don't know all the ins and outs of apt-get etc.). Some of the information there pointed to the r-recommended package being for 2.6.2. So I removed that using aptitude. Well, of course, then R didn't work at all. It was missing a library. So, I ran gdebi again to re-reinstalled R, hoping that that would pick up the libraries etc., and it worked! R works fine, and I was able to download mplayer. Still odd that apt-get had blocked me from adding mplayer just because of r-recommended. Thanks for the help, everyone. The suggestion to use aptitude was quite valuable; in retrospect, of course, I should have thought of the r-recommended problem, but aptitude really helped me zero in on it. All the other comments at least clarified things for me, and thus were valuable too. Norm _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
