Whenever I install a Debian, with a GUI, I usually use Synaptic to get my apps.
The greatest feature it has is the quick search box that doesn’t exist or is grayed out in the current builds.
Why ?
Because it’s missing a dependency called apt-xapian-index.
As a quick fix, close Synaptic and run:
sudo apt-get install apt-xapian-index
Sometimes you’ll need to do the above in the following order:
sudo apt-get install apt-xapian-index
sudo update-apt-xapian-index -vf
Where the second command above does some sort of initialization of the xapian search filter plugin for synaptic. Sometimes its also important to make sure your package archive is clean and up to date before doing the above two commands to install xapian. You can do this by the following:
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
The above commands remove no longer necessary or outdated files that were downloaded from previous installs via synaptic or the apt-get command, then automatically cleans the list of package archives, then cleans the list of package arechives, then updates and rebuilds a fresh copy of the package archives.
After this it may also be a good idea to just make sure you have no broken packages by doing:
sudo apt-get -f install
The above command fixes broken packages in place. Then it can also be nice to follow this up with a final command to make sure all the packages have been configured as intended by the installation procedure:
sudo dpkg –configure -a
Hope this can help those who may have trouble installing and getting xapian to work.