January 27
It appears that you don’t have a fresh install so you may have some
obsolete or unsupported packages. To make it easier to post details, I
suggest sticking to command-line tools in a terminal.
I almost always do stick to command-line tools. I am very
uncomfortable with any point-and-click interface.
It may be useful to determine which package installed R-3.5.1.
I installed R-3.5.1 from source. But I have been advised not to do
such "from source" installations, and am trying to switch over to using
the "sudo apt-get" paradigm. But have, as I have described, encountered
problems.
The apt-file command helps with this. You can use “which R” to find the full
path
of the installed version of R. Typically this is “/usr/bin/R” (but could
differ, e.g., if you installed R from source it might be
“/usr/local/bin/R”). Then install “apt-file” and run, e.g., “apt-file
search /usr/bin/R”.
The command "which R" produces "/usr/bin/R", as expected.
The “aptitude” package manager has a section for obsolete packages and
is text based so it is easy to past information into a forum post. If
you don’t already have it, I suggest you install “aptitude” and check
for obsolete packages. In “aptitude”,
enter “u” (lower-case) to update the list of available packages and “U”
to select
packages to be updated. Enter “g” to list the packages to be installed,
and “g”
again to do the install. If there are conflicts, aptitude will give you
some options to
keep or remove packages to resolve the conflict.
I did some stuff with aptitude (I had it installed already) but I'm not
really sure what I'm doing and found the interface to be mysterious.
If you have been using PPA’s from older Ubuntu versions you should
consider removing any that you no longer need. If you use a lot of PPA’s
there are PPA managers like Y-PPA-Manager or Aptik.
I just did a "sudo apt autoremove" (as prompted by "sudo apt-get
upgrade") and this seemed to remove a lot of rubbish. But the
avahi-dnsconfd.service still hung around.
Please note that the problem is, as far I can understand things, not
really with R, as such, but with the avahi-dnsconfd.service.
Following your advice I started aptitude and it seems to indicate that
avahi-dnsconfd is "partially installed". (It appears to be the only
such package.)
It is still not clear to me what to do about it. As indicated above,
autoremove does not get rid of it. I thought perhaps that explicitly
removing this package (and then (re-) installing it) might work, but I
am hesitant to try it and not sure of the syntax. Maybe something like:
sudo apt remove avahi-dnsconfd
sudo apt-get install avahi-dnsconfd
Would that be right? Would it work? Is it dangerous to try it? If this
isn't the right way to go, can you (or someone) suggest what would be
right and would work?
Thanks.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
P.S. I have attached a screenshot of the aptitude window that shows up
when I started aptitude and typed "g".
R. T.
