This simply means APT does not think the package with the name matching exactly what you entered is available in any repository your local APT knows of.
What does this mean? One of these two things:
- The package you'd like to find has some other name;
- The repository the package with that exact name is not known to APT.
What can you do about this?
First, try to search the package cache (the list of all the packages from the repositories known to APT on your system) for a less precise name, something like
apt-cache search libgmp
or even
apt-cache search gmp
might do the trick (you might want to pipe the output to less to be able to search further through it). For instance, the package might include a version in it, like libgmp4-dev (meaning there might be libgmp3-dev available or something like this).
Next, be sure APT knows about the repository containing that package.
On my Wheezy system, I have:
$ apt-cache search libgmp-dev
libgmp-dev - Multiprecision arithmetic library developers tools
libgmp3-dev - Multiprecision arithmetic library developers tools
and
$ apt-cache policy libgmp-dev
libgmp-dev:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 2:5.0.5+dfsg-2
Version table:
2:5.0.5+dfsg-2 0
500 http://http.debian.net/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages
which means the package is available in the standard (main) Debian repository.
So… make sure you have that repository available:
- Locate the file
/etc/apt/sources.list.
Try to find there an uncommented (not prefixed with the # character) line reading like
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main
and if you don't have one, try adding
deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy main
there, saving the file.
Run
# apt-get update
to fetch the package list from that repository and adding the list of available packages from it to the local APT's cache.
Verify the package became available using
$ apt-cache policy libgmp-dev
This isn't really the solution if you don't know which repository a package is in.
apt-cachecan only search things you already have in yoursources.list-- if you are trying to figure out what to add there to be able to find a package, this doesn't tell you anything about how to do that. – tripleee – 2018-04-17T06:58:23.097@tripleee, on a broader scale, you appear to paint, this problem is unsoluble unless you have access to any possible existing repository containing debian packages in the part of the universe accessible via TCP/IP. While this might be of some interest to philosophers, I fail to see any practical aspect to it—except for may be educating the OP on the backports or vendor-provided repos (and their attached perils). Feel free to post a bunch of comments then. – kostix – 2018-04-17T09:44:57.313
That, and Ubuntu's various universe / multiverse / third-party add-ons in their various guises; I was imagining there'd be an existing question and answer but couldn't quickly find one. I'll add a pointer if I do. – tripleee – 2018-04-17T09:47:34.540
@tripleee, note that the question is explicitly tagged as
– kostix – 2018-04-17T10:17:53.687debian(and was not asked on https://askubuntu.com FWIW), so should you go on explaining PPAs please be sure to state clearly the degree to which that information applies to Debian. I'd say this is a good start as long as we're concerned with Debian (and not specifically Ubuntu).