Thanks to Rob and Victorio for their advise about upgrading from stable to unstable. I first downloaded dpkg 1.4.8 and installed it by hand. After that I launched dselect and upgraded succesfully.
I watched the upgrade process closely and here are the notes I made during the procedure. Once I was in dselect I put several packages on hold, including bash2, emacs, xbase and various other big packages. In the first run I installed at least 46 new or updated packages without any problems. After that I went on and installed the rest of the packages on hold. The only thing that produced notable warnings was ldconfig which gave errors like "can't open /usr/lib/libdb.so skipping". After the install libdb.so was properly installed though and there were no dangling symlinks. The hold feature in dselect is very useful. It simplifies the installation since you can do it in many rounds with only a few packages in each round. Keep up the good work guys! Heikki, the happy Debian user. -- Heikki Vatiainen * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tampere University of Technology * Tampere, Finland