cannot install gcc

[John R. Sowden]

On 03/11/2014 06:30 AM, John R. Sowden wrote:
> On 03/11/2014 06:12 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 11 March 2014 13:05, John R. Sowden <jsowden at americansentry.net> 
>> wrote:
>>> got the following:
>>>
>>> Reading package lists... Done
>>> Building dependency tree
>>> Reading state information... Done
>>> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
>>
>> OK, mostly, that's good news. It means that there are no missing
>> dependencies or anything. The "1 not upgraded" bit might mean that you
>> have an package that's pinned at some lower/older version, though.
>>
>> I would suggest, next, that you try:
>> ran the two and this is returned after the 2nd:
>>
>> john at sentry10:~$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
>> Reading package lists... Done
>> Building dependency tree
>> Reading state information... Done
>> Calculating upgrade... Done
>> The following packages have been kept back:
>>   binutils
>> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
>>
>> binutils crashed earlier when I tried to extract the pkg
>> I tried to upgrade it, but, in ubuntu soft center it said it needed 
>> to delete a lot of pkgs, including free pascal-thought that was weird 
>> (reverse dependency?)
>>
>>
>> sudo apt-get update
>> sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
>>
>> If that works smoothly, good. If it installs stuff, it's probably
>> worth rebooting.
>>
>> Then try:
>>
>> sudo apt-get install build-essential -y
>>
>> That should bring in GCC and all its ancillary parts. If there are
>> problems, then this might help:
>>
>> sudo apt-get clean
>> sudo apt-get autoclean
>> sudo apt-get autoremove
>> sudo apt-get purge
>>
>> Then try
>>
>> sudo apt-get install build-essential -y
>>
>> ... again.
>>
>
It seems that my problem has to do with "held" files (from synaptic) but 
I cannot determine which files are "held" so I can delete them.

Help?