Well, I had originally installed Ubuntu under ext3, but could not write to it under Mac OS X, and did some searching online, and I seem to remember reading that MOSX works better with ext2 formatting than ext3, so I wiped my Linux partition, reformatted as ext2, and reinstalled Ubuntu. MOSX does now allow read/write to the Linux partition, whereas under ext3 it did not. Anyway, all that is just some background as why I chose ext2. I did as as you suggested, and tried installing dselect again, and this time it worked. I'm copying/pasting the text of the terminal window: nate@nne-macbook:~$ sudo apt-get install dselect [sudo] password for nate: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: dselect 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/186 kB of archives. After this operation, 1,077 kB of additional disk space will be used. (Reading database ... 189711 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking dselect (from .../dselect_1.16.0~ubuntu7_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Setting up dselect (1.16.0~ubuntu7) ... nate@nne-macbook:~$ I should mention that I have installed some packages related to APT and some compilers since we started this discussion. I don't know if that might be why this is now working or not. If you'd like, I could try to track down exactly what packages, and dependent files, I installed in the last few days and give you a list....or if you know of an easier way (maybe a cache of some sort), then you could instruct me on how to access it. Thanks 2011/8/21 Raphaël Hertzog