opera 12.16 needs gstreamer0.10-plugins-good BUT:...

jtwdyp · posted: 2016-06-27 00:14

I use different browsers for different things. For some things, like keeping a browser tab open to online dictionaries, google search results & wiki's, all day long, I like opera 12.16. (Which is I think, the last Opera version for Linux that doesn't just look like a clone of google-chrome, I intensely dislike google-chrome's user interface...) I could use Firefox for those things. But I use it to do things like online banking, after which I want to close the browser. Which would lose any of those tabs I was trying to keep open. I've never had much luck with konqueror, at least when I try to use it without installing the entire kde package... {It crashes too often.} And almost anything else able to deal with JavaScript, frames, etc... seems to have fallen in love with google-chrome's horrible user interface...

Anyway I knew I wanted opera 12.16 even before I put antiX-15.1 on my hard drive. So I added

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deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free

to the liveUSB's sources. And had opera 12.16 running on both the liveUSB and the hard drive installation.

That is until I updated my sources to make this antiX, a rolling release installation:

current active repos wrote:

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deb http://antix.daveserver.info/testing testing main nosystemd
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free

Then I ran:

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apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

But the dist-upgrade removed opera...

I wanted to see what I'd have to give up to get it back, so I tried to:

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~
UnderTree=-> apt-get install opera
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
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:
 opera : Depends: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
~
UnderTree=->

Is there any hope of getting a version of gstreamer0.10-plugins-good that IS compatible with the testing repos???

And/Or does anyone know of an available full function browser (besides Firefox or konqueror) that isn't just a google-chrome wanna-be???

dolphin_oracle · posted: 2016-06-27 01:27

is suspect your issue is that you left deb-multimedia enabled when you did the dist-upgrade. unpredictableness ensues when this happens.

jtwdyp · posted: 2016-06-27 18:52

dolphin_oracle wrote:is suspect your issue is that you left deb-multimedia enabled when you did the dist-upgrade. unpredictableness ensues when this happens.

"Doh!" Well I guess it's a good thing I don't run a nuclear reactor...

Yeah, My memory is vague on that But I think I may have...

I suppose the fix for it would be to:

1) back up my system.
2) disable deb-multimedia.
3) do another dist-upgrade. Making a list of any multimedia packages it plans to rip out.
4) reenable deb-multimedia, just long enough to apt-get the list.
5) if I don't like the results, restore the back-up...

That's a lot of work. So I'm thinking I might experiment with an alternative browser that I hadn't thought was available. It was on my list of things to try to get, when I was configuring the liveUSB.
So either QupZilla wasn't available in the stable repos, or I missed a line when I was experimenting with:

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apt-get install $NextOnList

But I found QupZilla on one of the other distro's. Haven;t played with it much, but it felt nicer than Midori or Chromium. So I'll try that as a substitute for a while. Who knows, I might like it better.