I had a similar problem (or as near as I can tell without the error message). For some reason, perl-5.005 was not installed completely, so I went into /etc/alternatives and changed the link `perl' to point to `perl-5.004' instead of `perl-5.005', everything worked fine after that. In other words (as root): # cd /etc/alternatives # rm perl # ln -s /usr/bin/perl-5.004 perl HTH, cbb Thanx for the info. I had another look through the Debian package site for unstable and had a good dig through the bug reports for some of the things that failed. I 'think' I may have found a bug report relating to this in perl. I think it might be a termcap problem, whatever that is. I'll have another look at it when I get home. I really appreciate Debians extensive system to ensure All dependencies are met before installation, but it can be frustrating when a package you want installs things like perl and debconf that you will probably never use. But , better safe than sorry. Cheers, John Gay