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I saw a nice program for managing pictures called gThumb. I decided to install it, but it uninstalled half of my programs and my theme altogether. I used Software Center to install it. Why would installing gThumb through Software Center mess up my PC? I'm using Debian 6.0.3 with Gnome.

Even Software Center disappeared from the System menu in gnome panel. I retrieved it by apt-get install software-center, and I think it installed it completely, not by updating or installing missing packages.

Edit: I tried apt-get -f install and it didn't work. I checked for programs in package manager but they are not there. They are UNINSTALLED for sure.

I reinstalled my system yesterday, so it's fresh now, but I would still like to know what happened.

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I'm going to go out on a limb and say your GNOME config may be hosed, but the programs are probably still installed. Unfortunately, I'm a Redhat person, so I can't help beyond that. I think your program is apt - you may want to Google that a little. – Aaron D. Marasco Dec 25 '11 at 2:21
For what @Aaron said you can create a new user and see if that user has the same problem. – phunehehe Dec 25 '11 at 16:07
Go into your apt-get or dpkg logs and see if you can find a record of what packages got changed. That would give you and everyone else a better idea of what happened and how to fix it. – jw013 Dec 25 '11 at 18:02

3 Answers

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You are aware that dpkg and apt keep logs, right? The apt ones are if you are using apt, so can be bypassed, but the dpkg ones cannot, since the package system has to use dpkg. They are in /var/log/apt/history.log.*.gz and /var/log/apt/term.*.gz (apt) and also /var/log/dpkg.log.*.gz (dpkg). You may be able to reconstruct a history of what happened from them. The first thing to see what packages if any have been removed.

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Try using killall gnome-panel in a terminal and reboot once, then check whether the programs are coming or not. Else run apt-get -f install to just automatically repair the dependancy problems on your system as mughil said.

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You can try to correct a system with broken dependencies by executing the command :

apt-get -f install
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What will this do? Is it likely to work in this case? – mattdm♦ Dec 25 '11 at 13:48

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