Apt-get :: Enable APT failing

Okay, apparently the first time I downloaded dsl-dpkg.dsl, it made a 0 byte file. Every other time after that, it created dsl-dpkg.dsl.1 dsl-dpkg.dsl.2 dsl-dpkg.dsl.3 ... They all downloaded fine, but the script choked. So I renamed one of the good ones, stripping off the number, and opened it (in emelfm). Seemed to work...

I can now run dselect (yay!). An attempt to install wine met with a colossal failure (libc6 wrong version, because it's a specifc DSL version, and about 20 billion things depended on it, so I was afraid to change it...) but whatever, I'll worry about it later.

Trying to get Synaptic working however, was even more frustrating. It wanted to downgrade my apt version, somewhere along the line, it choked on it's own vomit, and smoke poured out the side of my laptop (well, not really, but anyway).

I think at this point, I'm going to try reinstalling, and go straight to synaptic (or should I do the nifty "Upgrade to GNU" first?)

I have done it several times and all I do is enable synaptic. This seems to work fine for me. I don't think I have upgraded to gnu utils (this may explain why I can't install some things). My advice (from using HD installs exclusively) is to enable synaptic first then if you need to upgrade to gnu utils after you can.

original here.