Latest Kubuntu update

[nadreck at palain.com]

Hi all,

I just did the latest updates through Adept, and rebooted so I could
use the latest kernel. Upon restart, X did not start up (however it
did drop me at a terminal). I ran 'kdm' to start KDE, and it told me
'kdm' wasn't installed. Upon further investigation:

tycho at mittens:~$ sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
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.

Tycho, I had the exact same problem last night on my laptop. It looked to me a lot like the updates had somehow uninstalled the Kubuntu-desktop. Here is what I did:

When I ran Adept, or when I ran apt-get on the command line, I got the exact error you copied here. But I found a hint online that said to run Aptitude. This is run from the command line, but it gives a primitive "GUI" of sorts that you can click on inside the terminal. When I first ran it, it wanted to uninstall a lot of KDE stuff, presumably all things that were now broken after the update. I probably could have stopped it, but I let it uninstall those things. Then I selected the kubuntu-desktop package, and it resolved the dependencies and put everything back. I think I will need to install a few things that got removed and are not normally a part of the default kubuntu-dekstop package (i.e. Krusader), but at least I got my Kubuntu desktop back and working.

This looks like a recurrence of a problem that popped up a year ago, which is why I was able to get a clue. The idea of using Aptitude is that it apparently resolves dependencies a little differently than apt-get or Adept.

HTH,

-- 
Kevin B. O'Brien
nadreck at palain.com
Any industry that needs a federal bailout needs federal regulation.