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Find Me In The Woods
Asked: 2014-09-25 16:54:41 +0800 CST

Unity having "Damaged Packages" upon reinstall over Gnome 3

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When I got Gnome installed over Unity, on login I couldn't chose to return to the standard Unity desktop. Every time I attempt the simple 

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

I get the error

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.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

ubuntu-desktop : Depends: ubuntu-session but it is not going to be installed
  Depends: unity-control-center but it is not going to be installed
  Depends: unity-settings-daemon but it is not going to be installed
  Recommends: xul-ext-webaccounts but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I've tried everything, but Unity refuses to reinstall, and I don't wan't to reinstall Ubuntu completely. I use Ubuntu 14.04. Please Help!!!

unity

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Looks like something went wrong and now the package dependencies are broken.
    Go through the steps in How do I resolve unmet dependencies to get things back in order.

    Basically that's

    sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get -f install ubuntu-desktop

    Make sure you keep the output from these commands. If it's still broken after that it'll give valuable info about what's going on.

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  2. I solved this issue disabling all gnome3-staging repositories (in software-central) and reinstalling all the package dependencies.

    After trying to install each dependency (and it's sub-dependencies) with apt-get install, it showed me that I has some newer versions of some libraries.

    To solve it, I removed and installed each one of these newer versions.

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