After releasing Maemo SDK PR1.2 package dependencies in new builds automatically changed to new ones. I’ve already mentioned it in one of previous posts. So now imagine situation when you want to install a piece of software but newly built package is broken. First solution is turning off extras-devel catalogue. If you look at the maemo.org packages you can see that extras-devel contains newer versions (with unmet dependencies) than extras-testing (that contains  installable packages).

Installation failute example

There is also a way to cope with that problem without disabling extras-devel if you’re not scared of console. First of all every package has few versions available to download. You cannot see it in App Manager since it’s always proposing the last possible release. And now latest version is broken and we want to install previous one. First of all open X-Terminal and gain root rights by typing sudo gainroot (you need to install rootsh application before). Then you can check which version of desired package are available by typing apt-cache policy <package_name> like in example with qtirreco on the screenshot.

Package versions example

We can see available candidates of the package and we know that the newest one is broken, so let’s try with the previous one, in case of qtirreco is 0.3.0-1 and to install that you need to type apt-get install <package_name>=<version> like in example below.

Package installation example

Sometimes you will need to answer if you are sure to install some additional packages, answer yes then. If everything goes well you should have application installed. This method applies to every package that has at least one previous version in any catalogue.

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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial

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