I'm a newbie so if I've missed something obvious please fogive me

I'm running Debian sarge and I wanted to install nasm. After doing an apt-get update I did apt-get install nasm. It tells me that I need to upgrade e2fsprogs, e2fslibs, libc6, etc. Everything looked ok so I just let it do it's thing. After a minute or so it comes back saying it needs to remove the current e2fsprogs or something, and that I need to enable the force-loopback option. I figured e2fs* in general is pretty important stuff so I need not fiddle around with that. Hence I tried to pin e2fslibs and e2fsprogs in /etc/apt/preferences

Package: e2fslibs
Pin: version 1.35*
Pin-Priority: 1000

Package: e2fsprogs
Pin: version 1.35*
Pin-Priority: 1000

Then I typed apt-get install nasm again, and now it thinks all packages are pinned!! It comes back saying nasm needs a newer version of libc6, and won't automaticaly install a newer version. Of course what I was really trying to achieve is having apt do everything it did before except install e2fs*. Anyone got any ideas how to do this? I must be missing something here...it seesm to me that this should be something easy.

I also did apt-get update and then tried apt-get install nasm again with no success.

Thanks for the help!! I'm frustrated

You will want to search either Google Groups or at lists.debian.org on the e2fsprogs and the force-loop to get the solution to letting it uninstall then install the newer version needed I have seen it posted a couple of times on the Debian User mailing list..

Thanks happytux!

For a lack of better options I took a chance and enabled the force loopback option and luckily things worked out, but not without some obstacles, most notably my system wouldn't boot after because apt decided to remove an old kernel image and erased my grub config!

I was really lucky in that 1) I had a boot disk and 2) there was a vi swp file lying around, which served as my "backup". If it wasn't for the swp file, I'd have to google all over again just to find out how to write another grub config

I've learned to keep a real backup of important config files from now on.

Grub boot disk? If so then you could have went to the grub command prompt with c then used something like:
Replacing the x with the drive number and y with the partition number of the / of your install.