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I had vim working for a while and uninstalled it for no good reason. To reinstall it I gave the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

I get warnings that the respository deadsnakes/ppa and pycharm/ubuntu are not secure, but nothing that seems relevant (I guess)

sudo apt-get upgrade vim-runtime
sudo apt-get upgrade vim-common
sudo -i apt-get install vim

vim : Depends: vim-common (= 2:8.1.0320-1ubuntu3.1) but 2:8.1.0875-5ubuntu2 is to be installed
      Depends: vim-runtime (= 2:8.1.0320-1ubuntu3.1) but 2:8.1.0875-5ubuntu2 is to be installed

I then tried 

apt-get install -f

This appears to have done nothing since it says 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 21 not upgraded.

So I am pretty much stumped.

After getting vim working again, I would like to enable the system clipboard. I read that this is accomplished by installing vim-gnome. When I tried to do that, I encountered similar issues.

D. Ben Knoble
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Anna Naden
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    Welcome to [vi.se]! I've [edit]ed your question to make better use of our markdown syntax. On an unrelated note, I wonder if [unix.se] might not be able to help more? It seems like an ubuntu version issue. – D. Ben Knoble Dec 21 '19 at 02:47
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    You might also want to consider Ask Ubuntu, you'll find a lot more experts on Ubuntu package management there... – filbranden Dec 21 '19 at 04:08

1 Answers1

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I fixed it with 

sudo aptitude install vim

When aptitude told me about the dependencies and offered to fix them, I had tried saying yes, but that did not help. However, saying n caused aptitude to offer to downgrade the packages to their correct versions. When I said Y to that, it successfully installed vim.

Then it was easy to install vim-gnome with the command

sudo aptitude install vim-gnome

This, combined with the settings

Plugin 'repeat.vim'
Plugin 'vim-easyclip.vim'

in my vimrc allowed the paste operations to use the system clipboard, which was the ultimate goal. At least this last step is specific to vim and may be helpful to others.

A happy ending if the downgrading of the vim common and runtime does not have side effects!

D. Ben Knoble
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Anna Naden
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