I was trying to install GRASS Plugin for Quantum GIS (qgis-plugin-grass) in my Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat while I got the following error in Ubuntu Software Center:
Package dependencies cannot be resolved
This error could be caused by required additional software packages which are missing or not installable. Furthermore there could be a conflict between software packages which are not allowed to be installed at the same time.
I then launched Synaptic Package Manager (from System>Administration menu) and tried to install qgis-plugin grass and got the following error message:
qgis-plugin-grass:
Depends: libgdal1-1.6.0-grass but it is not going to be installed
I then tried to install libgdal1-1.6.0-grass which gave me the following error:
libgdal1-1.6.0-grass:
Depends: grass640-6 but it is not installable
I looked for grass640-6 package but it was not available. However, a package named grass was available which was at version number 6.0.4-rc6 was available. I decided to make a new dummy transitional package (which the developers should have done). To do so, I just created a directory grass640 with another directory DEBIAN and created a file control inside it:
mkdir -p grass640/DEBIAN touch grass640/DEBIAN/control
Then, I opened up control file that I just created in gedit:
gedit grass640/DEBIAN/control
and wrote the following content and saved it:
Package: grass640-6 Source: grass Version: 0.6.4.0-6 Architecture: all Maintainer: khattam@khattam.info Installed-Size: 0 Depends: grass Priority: extra Homepage: http://www.khattam.info Description: transitional dummy package for grass transitional dummy package to pull in grass
Then, I built the debain file:
dpkg-deb -b grass640/ ./
As a result, I got a file named grass640-6_0.6.4.0-6_all.deb in my current directory. If you don’t want to create it, you can use mine from here. Then I just installed it by double clicking on it. After that, I could install qgis-plugin-grass without problems.
Hope this helps.