Bsrgvty

That particular error message may indicate that you have held packages, but it may also indicate a different problem.

You can get a list of actual held packages with:

dpkg --get-selections | grep hold

If there are none, or none look related, then it's probably something else. Check carefully the output of the command you were trying when you got the error message, as there may be other clues in the full output from that command, aside from the error message.

Another method of troubleshooting may be to use aptitude rather than apt-get to try to install your package:

sudo aptitude install <packagename>

Aptitude will give up less easily, and will attempt to find solutions which may involve modifying other packages. It may give you more explanation of the problem and options for fixing it.

Occasionally aptitude will be too eager to remove or downgrade large numbers of packages to satisfy your request, in which case retrying with -f changes its priorities and helps it come up with solutions that involve removing/downgrading fewer packages even if it means not all changes you requested can go ahead:

sudo aptitude -f install <packagename>

That happened to me too. All I did was sudo apt-get update and that fixed my issue. Good luck.

I had a similar scenario in a fresh install of 14.04, with no files listed in dpkg --get-selections | grep hold, and no joy after sudo apt-get update.

What did fix it for me was a simple

sudo apt-get autoremove

When I tried to reinstall the failing package it worked fine. Yay!

I ran into a similar scenario regarding missing dependencies. In my case I was trying to install curl on ubuntu saucy salamander 13.10...

The error stated that the dependency required an earlier version of the curl3 library.

I was able to degrade to the earlier version by trying to install curl using aptitude.

When it noted the missing dependency, and the reason (required an earlier version of the library file), it gave me several options in how to respond... y//n/q

Y would have aborted the install, N would look for another option, and Q would simply quit and do nothing more, leaving a broken package.

I selected N, and it gave me the option to downgrade the library file to an earlier version. So that's what I did, and curl finished installing with no more errors.

• I may look into upgrading the library file again after the install, but hey, so far so good.

These are some fast and easy ways to fix the you have held broken packages error.

• Open your sources.list file in /etc/apt/sources.list and check that there aren't any software sources for a different Ubuntu release than the Ubuntu release that you are currently using. If you find any incorrect release lines in sources.list, open the sources.list file with sudoedit /etc/apt/sources.list, comment out the incorrect lines in sources.list by preceding them with a # character, save the sources.list file, and run sudo apt update to update the list of available software packages.



• 
  

  Select the Fix Broken Packages option in Synaptic package manager. Run the following commands to install Synaptic.

  
  
  

  sudo apt update 
  sudo apt upgrade 
  sudo apt install synaptic 
  

  
  
  

  Open Synaptic and in Synaptic select Edit -> Fix Broken Packages and then repeat Edit -> Fix Broken Packages a second time.

  
  
  

  In Synaptic in the left pane click the Custom Filters button which is marked by the mouse cursor in the below screenshot. From the list in the top left corner select Broken. In the center pane will be listed any broken packages that still need to be repaired.

  
  
  

  

  
  
  

  Select the broken packages one at a time. Select a broken package, and then open the terminal and run apt policy <package-name>. The results of this command will tell you if that broken package was installed from the default Ubuntu repositories or from some other source. If the broken package was installed from some other source, maybe that package can be removed along with its software source and replaced by a different version of the same package from the default Ubuntu repositories. Usually this means fixing a broken package by downgrading that package to an older version.

  
  


• 
  

  If you get this error message:

  
  
  

  Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution) 
  

  
  
  

  Run the following commands:

  
  
  

  sudo apt update 
  sudo apt upgrade 
  sudo apt-get -f install 
  

  
  


• 
  

  Manually remove a broken package.

  
  
  
  1. 
     

     Find your package in /var/lib/dpkg/info

     
     
     

     ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/info | grep <package>
     

     
     
  
  
  2. 
     

     Move the package folder to another location.

     
     
     

     cd /tmp && sudo mkdir new-package-location 
     sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.* /tmp/new-package-location/ 
     

     
     
  
  
  3. 
     

     Run the following command:

     
     
     

     sudo dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq <package> 
     

     
     
  
  

If all of these methods don't work it is possible that the broken packages are caused by something that is embedded so deeply in the operating system that none of these methods have any effect on it. The first obvious place to look for this deeply embedded "something" is in the software sources in /etc/apt/sources.list. Check the sources.list file to see if it contains any non-standard lines that may be causing a broken packages error. A standard Ubuntu sources.list file looks like the sources.list files in this answer.

The correct way to remove a suspicious line from sources.list is to comment it out by preceding it with a # character. Then run sudo apt update to refresh the list of available software.

Had the same problem, I ran that package check command from the other answer (dpkg --get-selections | grep hold)
and saw

tomcat7 deinstall
tomcat7-common install

so I used "apt-get remove tomcat7-common"

Then I could install Tomcat 6 (I was removing Tomcat 7 and installing Tomcat 6 as you do).

For me, none of the above worked because my system wasn't updated. I did

Home Key > Software Updater > Install

and updated my system; afterwards, I could install my package normally with apt.

I had the same problem reinstalling xsane after a failed ppa installation. As happened to yochannah, "no files listed in dpkg --get-selections | grep hold, and no joy after sudo apt-get update".

The hint that apt-get gave me is

xsane : Depends: libsane (>= 1.0.24) but it is not going to be installed

Because of yochannah answer, I had the feeling I must remove some previously installed packages. And it was so, I had to manually remove all related packages to sane, amongst others xsane-common and libsane, which was still installed as the ppa version.

Therefore, watch out what you have previously installed and tidy up!

I just ran into the same issue with Ubuntu Mate and I found this thread. My issue was trying to chain the update command together like this...

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove

Which should have worked. It didn't give me any errors, but it ran quick and gave me a list of packages that aren't ready for release yet. The result was I couldn't install my additional drivers.

I fixed it by running the update / upgrade / autoremove commands separately...

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove

That took the normal long time - especially upgrade - and now my installers work fine. I still don't know why chaining those commands together into one didn't work.

#head-scratcher

Here's my driver install running finally.

Good luck!

Update: After thinking about it for a bit, I think the warnings I was getting about the packages that aren't ready to be installed yet, were being treated as errors, and breaking the && chain from continuing. Probably had I just chained the commands together with ; it would have worked.

sudo apt update ; sudo apt upgrade -y ; sudo apt autoremove

This worked for me

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt list | grep python | cut -d "/" -f1 | xargs sudo apt-get remove -y
sudo apt list | grep python3.6 | grep -v libboost | cut -d "/" -f1 | xargs sudo apt-get install -y
sudo apt-get install python-pip -y
sudo apt-get install python3-pip -y