So I kind of managed to screw myself recently by upgrading gcc on my debian stable installation to the testing version to get gcc-3.3. ( First of all, will someone explain to me why gcc 3.3 still isn’t in stable yet? That’s just bizarre. ) So it turns out that the upgrade left me with a non-working symbian toolchain ( something’s wrong with wine? it’s hard to be certain ).

The OBVIOUS thing to do seems to be to downgrade but wait! apt-get doesn’t support downgrades. Instead I’m left with a bizarre situation where somehow I have to rebuild the dependency chain from the top down using older versions of the libs that are in stable. At least now I have learned about the following useful commands.

dpkg --get-selections

tells you what packages are installed

apt-get install foobar/stable

installs specifically the stable version of the package foobar. Here’s a useful thread .

Update: ( BACK UP FIRST! ) Hooray! Through a combination of apt-get remove libstdc++5 ( which I cancelled ) and looking at what it’s going to kill, and going through the list looking for the keystone dependencies, I found that the trick was to install the stable version of xlibs, and libstdc++3, and maybe one or two others, but anwyay I think I have it all back to stable now.

Update #2: I also wound up needing to use these tricks especially, cd /var/cache/apt/archives/ && dpkg --force-overwrite --install [package] Note that in the last case, an apt-get clean can make it easier to find the right package.