Unable to install boost ubuntu 13.10

Question

I'm trying to install boost onto my 32 bit Ubuntu 13.10 system. However, when I run:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

I get:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
libboost-all-dev : Depends: libboost-graph-parallel-dev but it is not going to be installed
                Depends: libboost-mpi-dev but it is not going to be installed
                Depends: libboost-mpi-python-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

To try to get around this, I've done:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libboost-all-dev

But it always comes back with

Package 'libboost-all-dev' is not installed, so not removed
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
binutils-dev cmake cmake-data comerr-dev expect grive krb5-multidev
libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-test-dev
libcurl4-openssl-dev libexpat1-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgnutls-dev
libgnutlsxx27 libgpg-error-dev libgssrpc4 libidn11-dev libjson-c-dev
libjson0-dev libkadm5clnt-mit8 libkadm5srv-mit8 libkdb5-6 libkrb5-dev
libldap2-dev libp11-kit-dev librtmp-dev libssl-dev libssl-doc libtasn1-3-dev
libyajl-dev

With nothing changed.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I found the answer for my case. Just run followings

$ sudo apt-get remove libboost1.55-all-dev
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Answer 2

None of that really worked.
What did work was installing symantec package manager and manually going through and removing the corrupted packages.

Once all the broken packages were removed, installation worked as expected.
Thanks for your help though.

Answer 3

At first remove the broken packages with,

$>sudo apt-get install -f
$>sudo dpkg --configure -a
$>sudo apt-get --fix-broken install
$>sudo apt-get --fix-missing install
$>sudo apt-get clean
$>sudo apt-get autoclean
$>sudo apt-get autoremove

Then upgrade/update the package base,

$>sudo apt-get update
$>sudo apt-get upgrade 

Then,

$>sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

If the error persists still, then

$> sudo apt-get install <here goes the dependent pkg, in your case here, 'libboost-graph-parallel-dev' etc.>

This should work probably fine. If still you get an error of broken packages, you have to check for the

/var/lib/dpkg/status

file & check for the package which is broken, then remove it.

For more details, check out here.