I've been experimenting with the various flavors of anitX and have run into an issue.

Sometimes for a period of several hours apt-get cannot find packages such as synaptic
Since I had more than one installed antiX when this happened I just copied the .deb to the other install.
After synaptic was installed everything started working -- this was using 64 bit base install on both instances.
Fortunately the first install had no problem and was able to get synaptic.

I'm now trying 32 bit base (note both base versions had no problem with network connection -- mentioned in a previous post). On this first base 32 bit version I'm getting the same problem -- apt-get cannot retrieve any packages. It does connect to the repo reports successful checking of the resposity but respones with the message that synaptic is missing although it does recognize that it has references in other packages -- really odd.

On the first occasion I don't know if my manaul installing synaptic fixed the issue or that the repo (jessie) was corrected.

Is this a common occurance -- has anyone seen this before. On a one off I can manually download and install -- however doing so for each dependency would be a pain -- further ths plan is to automate the install of several packages as needed by others.

OK, found a solution.
On a new install dircet use of apt-get fails -- appears to be the old Debian depenency confusion.

After using a pre-set download from the meta-installer everything starts to work properly (I randomly started at the beginning with audacious).

Something in the initial database is confused.

GrayKing wrote:OK, found a solution.
On a new install dircet use of apt-get fails -- appears to be the old Debian depenency confusion.

After using a pre-set download from the meta-installer everything starts to work properly (I randomly started at the beginning with audacious).

Something in the initial database is confused.

make sure you reload your sources before using synaptic. it is not automatic. a slight version change upstream will cause packages to look like they are missing, when what is happening is synaptic is trying to download based on out of date information.

the reason running the metapackage-installer first works for you is that before downloading any packages, metapackage-installer does update the sources, and synaptic and apt (which is what metapackage-installer uses on the backend) use the same database info.

Thanks good point ... trouble was getting synaptic. I tried Debian first many years ago (15? -- long time for computer anyway) and constantly had trouble with the package system breaking. They seem to have fixed them by moving them to a new level.

The Synaptic program is only included in the full flavour. If you want to use base or core the you either need to get used to using apt-get or you need to use apt-get to install synaptic.

Perhaps we could do a better job of making this more clear.

Whenever you install a Debian based distro, you will always need to do an apt-get update before downloading packages.

Sort of related to this thread, I have the following come up when trying to install vlc:
Running AntiX-15 base, on 'stable' repos.

EDIT: I booted a live version of AntiX-15 full iso and vlc installed correctly, repos are exactly the same in the base version on the HD, so I am puzzled by this, and would appreciate any suggestions.

you apparently either have or had the deb-multimedia repo enabled. note the dm* suffix on vlc-nox.

dolphin_oracle wrote:you apparently either have or had the deb-multimedia repo enabled. note the dm* suffix on vlc-nox.

Thank you! That did the trick, though I don't really understand why enabling those repos makes it impossible to install vlc?

deb-multimedia is a third party repo that hosts it's own versions of apps and backends. there are often conflicts because they go there own way on occasion with anything that uses libav or ffmpeg.

it's not evil but it can be annoying. you should never leave deb-multimedia enabled full time. and never dist upgrade with it enabled. tears will result.

Thanks for the reply, I will remember that for future use.