Ok,

so I had the bright idea of searching the YDL site (rather than the
MySQL and Berkeley DB sites) and found that packages exist that I should
be able to use.

But after an 'apt-get update' I try a 'apt-get install mysql' and
get a huge list of errors. Such as:

mysql: PreDepends: /sbin/ldconfig but it is not installable
PreDepends: /sbin/install-info but it is not installable
Depends: perl-DBI but it is not going to be installed
Depends: perl-DBD-MySQL but it is not going to be installed
PreDepends: /bin/sh but it is not installable

Actually, a whole several pages of this for a lot of different packages
that seem unrelated (like ncurses). I get a suggestion of:

E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages.


I loathe to try this without fully understanding the implications (not
wanting to hose my distribution totally). Does anyone have an idea of
what I have done wrong so far.

Two bits of info: (1) I'm running this through a proxy server but
have configured apt-get to know this (so the update worked fine), and
(2) I'm running it as root so I expected no permissions problems.

TIA,
Stefan