About your requirements, Iceweasel is the supported Firefox derivative (fork), I'm currently running debian as my desktop OS at work and use iceweasel every day, no problem. Gnome3, I think it'll be available on the next stable release, BTW what release are you running? Squeeze? If so I think (IIRC) Wheezy will have it. And finally, about graphics performance/quality, that depends a lot on your graphics card and its driver, but if you think of it like having transparencies, windows closing with fancy effects and so on, you'll need a moderm desktop or compiz (work with gnome2) which I think its available on stable (wheeze).
I have modified a bit your sources.list for wheeze, do you mind to test it and report back?
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze contrib non-free main
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main non-free contrib
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/updates main
# squeeze-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://mirror.cse.iitk.ac.in/debian/ squeeze-updates main non-free contrib
deb-src http://mirror.cse.iitk.ac.in/debian/ squeeze-updates main non-free contrib
# 3rd party repositories
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free
If you happen to be using wheezy or sid you'll have to change all squeeze ocurrences for the one you're using.
Please, backup your sources.list before replacing it, then test it as follows:
Refresh caches
# apt-get update
Search package
# apt-cache vlc
Install package
# apt-get install <package_name>
If find trouble, please report back with output for those three commands, or at least for the first and last.
Also, if you are already using Wheezy or sid, forget what I said about Gnome3 not being available, it should be there but wheezy is yet to be release and sid is always the development branch.
The package actions for aptitude are stored in /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
, this is separate from any dpkg
states. You might want to back the above file up before trying the following in case the results are undesirable and it is difficult for you to get back to where you were. The following should do what you are looking for (remember to quit any running aptitude instance first and also run as root):
aptitude -F %p search '~ri386 ~ainstall' | cut -d : -f 1 >i386
aptitude -F %p search '~ramd64 ~i | ~ramd64 ~ainstall' | cut -d : -f 1 | sort >amd64
aptitude --schedule-only keep $(comm -13 amd64 i386 | sed 's/$/:i386/')
rm i386 amd64
When you restart the GUI, hopefully you have what you are looking for :)
Best Answer
Assuming you know Python, and if you don't today is a good day to start...the documentation for the apt python bindings has a worked example which is relevant, though it may not be a complete solution.
and look at
/usr/share/doc/python-apt-doc/examples/missing-deps.py
. I'm using Debian squeeze.I just tried it
and it does produce a small list of packages. My understanding of this script is that it produces a list of packages that are currently uninstallable on Debian main. However, I don't have a Debian unstable installation handy at the moment to test it with.