Hi...looking for directions here, help appreciated. Eb3 has been os for a while now after much hopping around. New OS looks good and is fast on my 901. Despite all im still a linux noob... instalation went pretty well thanks to posts here, managed it on my second attempt. I probably shouldn't have, not patient enough for the stable release. my concern is related to synaptic. i've had things running just for web surfing the last few days all good, however, if i attempt to install any packages i'm hit with long lists of packages to be removed/upgraded. my guess was that there was a problem to solve to avoid this but im stumped. suggeestions appreciated, thanks all

Make sure the Debian sources are not ticked in the System > Administration > Software Sources
You want to be using the eb4 and apptesting repos
Let the upgrades run. Then you will be caught up with the latest version of the Aurora Beta.

Thanks TRIPgod, gave that a whirl, though software sources is only visible if I go into synaptic and choose repositories. went there and unchecked the deb repos leaving only the apptesting and eb4 repo. as i said i'm not very competant with linux, still finding the same large number of changes required to install a package. i went with the webcam cheese to try it out with pretty similiar results. I could go with it but still suspect i'm missing something that might be obvious to others here on the forum... thanks for your help, further suggestions appreciated.

What are you trying to install, and what is it trying to install automatically along with it?

/home/baz/Desktop/Screenshot.png

bit of a struggle for me trying to include a screen shot... thanks for getting back to me....attempting to download skype it stated 123 packages to be installed, 189 to be upgraded and 9 to be removed.
i noticed transmission was one of the packages to be removed. does that sound ok?
ta for the help

OK, correct me if I'm wrong, but what you've done so far is to install the EB4 beta, then remove the debian repos, right? You haven't upgraded anything since installing EB4?

If that is true, then yes, there are a lot of upgrades available, because quite a few programs have been updated since the EB4 beta was released, and you're getting all the updates at once.

I believe that the next thing you should do in that case is to click Reload, then Mark All Upgrades, then Apply, and let it download and install the upgrades it has found. (I don't really use Synaptic much myself, preferring the shell, but I think that's the way updates are done - someone else probably knows this part better). With that many updates, this will probably take a while.
Note that if something asks you to restart gdm, you shouldn't let it - as that is likely to abort your X session, and the upgrade with it, possibly leading to a broken system. I'm not sure if anything will ask - I would hope not, actually - but if it does, be careful. With such a large upgrade I think it's better to reboot after it's done to make sure everything that needs to be restarted has been.

As for the "transmission" package, I don't think it hurts anything to remove it - my system doesn't have it installed, and it appears to just be a metapackage anyway.