Thanks VastOne.

Yep l've lost medit but assumed it was something that I had done. glad to know that it wasn't    I'll wait and see what happens
Cheers 

Hi folks
Its all way above me this. I had broken symlink files which i have after reading loads deleted them all. That leaves me with thousands of " missing-copyright-files ". I have spent ages reading pages of stuff on the net but can't find anywhere that tells me how to reinstall them, at least nothing that i understand, so would appreciate some help / advice on what i should do about them. This all stems from trying to install my all in one ET-2750 scanner driver. ( still not installed ) the printer itself is working. I also have loads of "  undefined-symbol " errors and loads of other stuff too. I guess the only thing to do is a complete reinstall

Hi Folks

Well I installed adequate the other day as i found out the it told you about problems on your PC, Which it did. It told me that were were over 2400 errors / problems
but they scrolled past so fast that i could read them and i have no idea where it has stored them, I assumed that it does keep them somewhere, and i can't find the file / folder.
I did notice that it said there were broken file / symlinks which I need to fix but I can't get it to list just the broken files. I did try " adequate --all -deconf " but that didn't have them in it either.
so again I have no idea what to do and although I looked on debian site all I could find was a list of the things if checked. looking through the code I did see the list that it runs. Can I just hash out the ones that i don't want at the moment or will that cause havoc

Hi Packrat

Thanks for the link. It downloaded loads of stuff, no idea what it was about though. Still it let me install 1 program that I was having problems with.

Hi Folks

back again trying to fix find broken held packages.
so far I have tried

dpkg --get- selection | grep hold and it returns nothing
apt-get --fix-missing update which told me there were 9 upgradable items which I have done. yet when I run ./install.sh it still keeps telling me that

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libgcc1 : Depends: gcc-10-base (= 10.1.0-1) but 10.1.0-4 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

is there anything else that i can do as i have repeatedly tried the above commands

Edit

Since correcting my sources.list the error message has changed to

Package libboost-program-options1.67.0 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 'libboost-filesystem1.67.0' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'libboost-program-options1.67.0' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'libboost-system1.67.0' has no installation candidate

Forgot I have also used apt-get update --fix-missing , apt-get install -f, dpkg --configure -a

Hi PackRat.
Did an upgrade using smxi like i normally do earlier today. I don't know if that is the best way though.
I only downloaded synaptic to see if there was a driver for the printer that I just bought, and there was. I was trying to do it via Epson but i kept getting the problem that I mentioned before and still get while trying to install the scanner driver.
Anyway thanks for the reply time and effort you keep giving me. I'll check out the link tomorrow  and see if I can work it out. Cheers for now 

Hi All
New Printer has arrived and is working.
Downloaded synaptic manager and the driver was in there.