[ubuntu-uk] ppa problem

[William Anderson]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 8:33 PM Jim Price <d1version at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

There's a few different things you could try, but you could try these
steps (carefully, or NOT AT ALL if you're not 100% sure what you're
doing):

# this is from askubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/a/148968
# look at what PPAs you have installed, and look for
# one with VLC in the name
for APT in $(find /etc/apt/ -name \*.list); do \
 grep -o "^deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/[a-z0-9\-]\+/[a-z0-9\-]\+" ${APT} \
 | while read ENTRY ; do USER=`echo ${ENTRY} | cut -d/ -f4`; \
 PPA=$(echo $ENTRY | cut -d/ -f5); echo ppa:${USER}/${PPA}; \
 done; done | grep -i vlc

# If you get an output from the above like "ppa:vlc/vlc", then
# let's remove that PPA repo
apt-add-repository -r ppa:vlc/vlc
# change ppa:vlc/vlc for whatever PPA you got from that search
# press RETURN or ENTER to remove the PPA

# purge all VLC packages (this will purge EVERY package
# with a name starting with the letters vlc)
apt-get purge $(dpkg -l vlc\* | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2}')

# then let's make doubly sure universe is there
apt-add-repository -r universe
apt-get -qq update
apt-add-repository universe
apt-get -qq update

# then let's install your package
apt-get install vlc-nox
# (or whatever you're trying to install)

If any of that doesn't make sense, DON'T RUN IT, but hopefully it'll
put you in the right direction.

-n