Ubuntu 16.04 has the wrong version of biber shipped, biber 2.3 is too low to be compatible with biblatex:
$ sudo apt-get install texlive-bibtex-extra biber
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
texlive-bibtex-extra is already the newest version (2015.20160320-1).
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
texlive-bibtex-extra : Breaks: biber (< 2.4) but 2.3-1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
I need this working, and I have little idea how these systems work. A maintainer wrote:
Accepted biber into xenial-proposed. The package will build now and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/biber/2.4-1ubuntu1.16.04.1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.
I followed the instructions to allow -proposed, but sudo apt-get upgrade biber
wouldnt update it to 2.4. How can I get biber version 2.4? Does it have to go through -proposed, or is there a simpler way?
I also tried
- Download the downloadable file from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/amd64/biber/2.4-1ubuntu1.16.04.1
- Double click to install (Ubuntu software says "2.4-1ubuntu1.16.04.1")
- When done with installation, it says "2.3-1". Sad face.
Best Answer
This has been fixed yesterday (2016/06/28) ; now you can install directly
biber
(it will install version 2.4; be sure to do ansudo apt-get update
before).It will pull a lot of
perl
libraries, but it will not try to remove half of your LaTeX installation.See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/biber/+bug/1589644/comments/21