Bdtyktl

I tried installing Steam today on my laptop, and to no surprise it's broken and needs tweaking just like every single time I have ever installed Steam on Linux.

In my process of trying to fix the missing dependencies, I managed to completely and utterly break my apt-get functionality it appears.

Here's what is going on.

sudo apt-get install cowsay

which pops out the lovely and rather completely useless message:

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

cowsay is already the newest version.

You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

 libllvm3.6:i386 : Depends: zlib1g:i386 (>= 1:1.2.0) but it is not going to 

be installed

 libpciaccess0:i386 : Depends: zlib1g:i386 (>= 1:1.2.3.3) but it is not going to be installed

E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).



So I do the next logical step, the console is telling me to run:



    sudo apt-get -f install

Alright, well try that. Nope, I'm just going to give you the illusion that I'm working and make you mad:

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

Correcting dependencies... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

  zlib1g:i386



The following NEW packages will be installed:

  zlib1g:i386



0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 13 not upgraded.

6 not fully installed or removed.



Need to get 0 B/52.9 kB of archives.



After this operation, 182 kB of additional disk space will be used.



Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y



(Reading database ... 386548 files and directories currently installed.)

Preparing to unpack .../zlib1g_1%3a1.2.8.dfsg-2ubuntu1_i386.deb ...

Unpacking zlib1g:i386 (1:1.2.8.dfsg-2ubuntu1) ...

dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/zlib1g_1%3a1.2.8.dfsg-2ubuntu1_i386.deb (--unpack):

 trying to overwrite shared '/usr/share/doc/zlib1g/changelog.Debian.gz', which is different from other instances of package zlib1g:i386



Errors were encountered while processing:

 /var/cache/apt/archives/zlib1g_1%3a1.2.8.dfsg-2ubuntu1_i386.deb



E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

At this point, I feel like I've tried everything. I followed a pretty lengthy guide on try reconfiguring my dpkg, using apt-get clean, and so on. Rebooting has done nothing for me.

I'm completely lost. I'd just reinstall Linux but I don't want to backup all my work just because Steam broke my freaking apt-get.

I just fixed it. What I had to do was outlined in this post:
Broken dependencies due to libjackd

So I went to /usr/share/doc and then took zlib1g and zlib1g-dev and renamed both with a .old on the back. This allowed me to do my

apt-get -f install

and things seem to be happy now.