[lug] Recovering from massive Ubuntu mess

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi. Hey, guess what?

Yet again, Ubuntu has really screwed me over. Short version is I used the
tasksel program to try to set up Samba. Big mistake.

Apparently, tasksel "helps" by running apt autoremove. The 1st thing in
it's display was a taskbar removing a bunch of stuff. I've been avoiding
doing autoremove, despite apt telling me I could do so, because of how
badly I got hosed the last time.

Anyways, lots of stuff is gone, and I'm trying to get things back. I dare
not reboot, because some things are working now only because they were
open, so I guess the reference count is keeping the files from being
deleted.

I'm at the point of trying get system-config-printer installed. It's a long
lineup of apt not installing, due to broken packages, but I think I'm at
the bottom now, but I can't go anywhere. The apt --force-yes is deprecated,
and it tell me to use one of the "allow" options, so here's what that looks
like. So, what can I do here?

# apt-get install --allow-change-held-packages gir1.2-freedesktop
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:
 gir1.2-freedesktop : Depends: gir1.2-glib-2.0 (= 1.64.0-2) but
1.64.1-1~ubuntu20.04.1 is to be installed E: Unable to correct problems,
you have held broken packages.

# dpkg --list gir1.2-glib-2.0
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
|
Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name
         Version                Architecture Description
+++-=====================-======================-============-=====================================================
ii  gir1.2-glib-2.0:amd64 1.64.1-1~ubuntu20.04.1 amd64        Introspection
data for GLib, GObject, Gio and GModule

-- 
All operating systems suck, but Linux just sucks less
 - Linus Torvalds