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Albert
Asked: 2014-12-23 03:06:40 +0800 CST

apt-get, unmet dependencies, ... "but it is not going to be installed"

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$ apt-get install -f -o 'Dpkg::Options::=--force-confmiss --force-all --force-confnew --overwrite-conffiles' --reinstall at-spi2-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 kde-workspace-bin : Depends: qdbus but it is not going to be installed
 libqt4-dbus : Depends: qdbus (= 4:4.8.5+git192-g085f851+dfsg-2ubuntu4) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

I don't quite understand "but it is not going to be installed". Why doesn't it install it then?

apt-get -f install does not help, it does nothing:

$ apt-get install -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
apt

9 Answers

  1. This worked for me.

    $ sudo apt-get install <missing-package-1> <missing-package-2> ...

    I don't know why this is necessary, but manually installing the problematic packages worked.

    After installing the first round of unmet dependencies, another one popped up, but I repeated the process and it sorted itself out after two cycles.

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  2. As this question also didn't help, I found on this LinuxQuestions thread a hint that helped me:

    Do you have a mixed /etc/apt/sources.list? It appears that you're trying to install one package from a newer repository but that it doesn't have access to a repository with the newer dependencies.

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  3. I ran into this issue and solved it by running:

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

    Then when I ran the original "apt-get install" command succeeded.

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  4. Nothing above worked for me but following procedure saved me

    sudo dpkg --configure -a

    this will list the broken packages and

    sudo dpkg -r librrd4

    {librrd4 and libpng12 were my broken pakages solved the problem

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  5. I also had the same issue while installing Guake; it showed unmet dependencies with Python. Even trying to reinstall python using sudo apt-get install --reinstall python did nothing.

    Finally,

    Step-1: I had to remove and install python again using:

    Note: Uninstalling python leads to removing many other dependencies which may break the installed Ubuntu, so be careful while uninstalling python

    sudo apt-get purge python

    sudo apt-get install python

    Step-2: Install the original package (in my case it was guake)

    sudo apt-get install guake

    This installed all necessary dependencies.

    Try the same procedure w/ your packages and it should work for you too.

    • 1

  6. I had similar problems with cups-filters on raspberrypi caused by realvnc-vnc-server. It was due to foomatic-filters being deprecated. I couldn't install or uninstall anything so what worked for me was to delete the apt cache for cups-filters.

    sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/cups-filters*

    Then the install worked as suggested by @funroll

    sudo apt install cups cup-filters

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  7. In my case it needed the version of the package from focal, but it wanted to install the version from focal-updates. On theory it can be fixed by running apt-install pkg_name_here=older_specific_version_here. In my specific case that wasn't acceptable because i had many packages depending on the newer version of one of the nested dependencies which it wanted to remove along the downgrade, so i said no.

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  8. I had a similar issue while trying to install another package. Using aptitude instead of apt-get helped solve the issue for me. Refer this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/1379008/413845

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  9. Get your broken/missing dependencies using

    sudo dpkg --configure -a

    Once you have it, try installing them manually.

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