[ubuntu-uk] ppa problem

[Jim Price]

I've ended up in a bit of a bind. I updated from 14.04 to 16.04, which 
seemed to go well but then I noticed that VLC was no longer installed. 
On trying to re-install it, it could not find its dependency on vlc-nox. 
vlc-nox is not in the 16.04 repo. I tried all the googleable 
suggestions, but it would seem that as the version I had was installed 
from a ppa and although the ppa is disabled (it got that way during the 
upgrade) even re-enabling it didn't allow me to reinstall vlc and then 
ppa-purge it. The ppa was the videolan stable repo. Is there any way of 
telling the apt database that the package details (specifically the 
dependencies I guess) are not correct any more for vlc and it should 
reload them from the universe repo?

I did think of trying the snap of vlc, but that didn't work with a 
similar error message. There are now two vlc packages visible in 
synaptic too, which may be the result of something else I've tried.

-- 
JimP