E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages

Question

I have tried to install wine on elementary os 0.21 yesterday. While doing so i stumbled upon this output:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 adduser : Depends: passwd (>= 1:4.0.12)
 libqtgui4:i386 : Depends: libaudio2:i386 but it is not going to be installed
 libsm6 : Depends: libuuid1 (>= 2.16) but it is not going to be installed
 libuuid1:i386 : Depends: passwd:i386
                 Recommends: uuid-runtime:i386
 openssh-client : Depends: passwd
 procps : Depends: initscripts
 upstart : Depends: libnih-dbus1 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libnih1 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: initscripts
           Depends: mountall
           Depends: ifupdown (>= 0.6.10ubuntu5)
 wine : Depends: wine1.6 but it is not going to be installed or
                 wine1.7 but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

I tried to solve this by trying sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade and so on. Nothing has helped me so far and maybe i need to remove some packages but i am not sure which ones i would have to remove in order to solve the problem.

Solution 1

Try

sudo dpkg --configure -a

and remove printed packages with sudo dpkg --remove [package-name].

Solution 2

To install wine use aptitude instead of apt-get. For example:

sudo aptitude install <packagename>

Comments

[nextloop]

I found correction of this bug here

[Kristada673]

I am also facing the same issue. When I try to sudo dpkg --remove [package-name], I get the following error: dpkg: error processing package libpulse0:amd64 (--remove): dependency problems - not removing Errors were encountered while processing: libpulse0:amd64 Any suggestions on what I can do?

[Michael Mantion]

I get no output from sudo dpkg --configure -a . Do you have any other suggestion to figure out what is wrong. Is there a way to just re-install apt?

[Kojo]

Best advice IMHO, since Wine relies on a bunch of dependencies, including many i386 packages.

[SdSaati]

I had this problem with emacs(I wanted to remove it), then by using sudo apt autoremove emacs emacs23 emacs24 emacs25 emacs-lucid emacs-gtk emacs-nox problem solved for me

[Melroy van den Berg]

aptitude does indeed give a better output what was wrong.