Packages are not installing, many "unable to locate" errors

Question

I am trying to install packages using apt-get:

root@ubuntu:/# sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev gettext unzip
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package libcurl4-gnutls-dev is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Unable to locate package build-essential
E: Unable to locate package libssl-dev
E: Package 'libcurl4-gnutls-dev' has no installation candidate
E: Unable to locate package libexpat1-dev
E: Unable to locate package gettext
E: Unable to locate package unzip

My main goal is to install package make , which I need to manually install a lower version of PHP

This is what happened:

root@ubuntu:~/php-5.4.31# make
The program 'make' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
apt-get install make

And then I go on and do apt-get install make

root@ubuntu:/# apt-get install make
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package make is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'make' has no installation candidate

I am running Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS on a virtual machine (Hyper-V) if that helps

Solution

I had the sme problem only before a few days. Try to run

# apt-get update

Your apt-repository is outdated. This might be the problem.

Comments

[Sylvain Pineau]

ok, thanks for the confirmation. So you may have a broken sources.list, look at How do I restore the default repositories? for ways to restore your source settings

[user3170899]

@SylvainPineau Magnificent!!! It worked Thank you very much. I think the problem was that I was not paying too much attention on which country I was selecting during installation as I was in a rush?

[Sylvain Pineau]

Excellent, I'm going to propose to close your question as a duplicate of How do I restore the default repositories? instead.

[user3170899]

here is another problem I think: when I do apt-get update it installs just some of the updates but not all of it, I am thinking this is the problem? I am using sudo su

[user3170899]

this is the error: Err us.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/main i386 Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.15 80] (could Ubuntu be down???) (there are a lot more of these with the same errors just posting one for example)

[LittleByBlue]

Ok, the 404 error code is like mine. I don't now why there raring-backports sources are. Try $ ping -c 2 91.189.91.15

[user3170899]

No drops 0% packet loss, Time was 1007 ms

[Sylvain Pineau]

@user3170899 raring-backports? 13.04 is an EOL release. your VM is not running 14.04 but 13.04, you can quickly check it with lsb_release -d