How to Install Missing Dependencies on Ubuntu System

aptaptitudesynaptic

I was fooling around trying to fix this problem, and I removed some important packages. When I realized that it was cleaning out more things that I had intended, I just rebooted, rather than try to find the forked process and stop it. Now I can see in aptitude that I have several broken packages, which do NOT show up in synaptic. Rather than try to install the missing packages (e.g., Python, YIKES!), the "resolution" is to remove 354 packages that are still installed which depend on what's missing. Is there a command to go through all the installed packages, and make sure that all of their dependencies are also installed? If I could just get a list, that would be useful, but, clearly, a command to just "do it" and install them would be better.

Best Answer

Other than the installation and/or apt-get -f install suggestions mentioned in comments, you can tell aptitude to find a different resolution by using the , and . keys to navigate through the list of available resolutions in the examine view (entered with e). Sometimes the first suggested resolution involves uninstalling packages, whereas the next few will involve upgrade/downgrade/re-install operations.

In addition, you can "accept" or "reject" proposals regarding individual packages by selecting them in the list at the top and using a or r keys respectively. This will force aptitude to find solutions that respect your requirements (although if you specify too many it may fail to find a resolution altogether).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Annotating packages at installation to ease maintenance with apt / aptitude

Aptitude supports "user tags", see if they meet your requirements.

   add-user-tag, remove-user-tag
       Adds a user tag to or removes a user tag from the selected group of
       packages. If a package name contains a tilde ("~") or question mark
       ("?"), it is treated as a search pattern and the tag is added to or
       removed from all the packages that match the pattern (see the
       section "Search Patterns" in the aptitude reference manual).

       User tags are arbitrary strings associated with a package. They can
       be used with the ?user-tag(<tag>) search term, which will select
       all the packages that have a user tag matching <tag>.

Also see the options --add-user-tag, --add-user-tag-to, --remove-user-tag, --remove-user-tag-from. One example usage:

aptitude install cinnamon --add-user-tag "for=cinnamon; date=$(date)"

Nevertheless, I fear they are only visible/usable through aptitude.

Ubuntu – apt-get and aptitude seem to disagree — do I really have broken packages

There is probably nothing really wrong.

Simple answer: apt-get and aptitude have different dependency resolvers (how-do-i-fix-these-broken-dependencies).

To see if there is actually an issue you can run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall foomatic-db-compressed-ppds xz-lzma

Personally, I would advise against using aptitude as it can sometimes be dangerous.

apt-get is much safer and will not install with broken packages in place, however, apt-get is rarely, if ever, able to to fix an impossible situation because of broken packages. aptitude does have ability to fix broken packages but aptitude also has the ability to create a situation where broken packages exist.

A happy medium is synaptic. synaptic has more ability to fix broken packages than apt-get but does not have quite the ability of aptitude to create such a situation.

Sources: how-do-i-fix-these-broken-dependencies

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Annotating packages at installation to ease maintenance with apt / aptitude

Ubuntu – apt-get and aptitude seem to disagree — do I really have broken packages

Related Question