[FIXED] Broken packages error installing phpmyadmin

Issue

I am copying a wordpress site manually to a digitalocean server and need to import the database as described in the techie method here: http://wpencyclopedia.com/enc/index.htm?moving-wordpress.htm

It looks like phpmyadmin is needed to import the database (that is, I can't ftp over the .sql file?)

I installed phpmyadmin, the import didn't work, so I uninstalled it, and now cannot install it again. I'm getting this error. Considering starting from scratch with a fresh Ubuntu.

zhellman@dev-website:~$ sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin 
Reading package lists... Done 
Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could 
not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation 
or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have 
not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information 
may help to resolve the situation:


phpmyadmin : Depends: php but it is not installable
              Depends: php-cli but it is not installable
              Depends: php-mysql but it is not installable
              Depends: php-json but it is not installable
              Depends: php-mbstring but it is not installable
              Depends: php-xml but it is not installable
              Recommends: php-gd but it is not installable
              Recommends: php-bz2 but it is not installable
              Recommends: php-zip but it is not installable
              Recommends: php-tcpdf but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Solution

It looks like phpmyadmin is needed to import the database (that is, I can't ftp over the .sql file?)

As far as I know, all Digital Ocean droplets are fully functional VPS instances, so you get full access to do whatever you want. If you want to FTP/SFTP/SCP a file to the local file system and use the mysql command line client to import, that should be no problem.

Furthermore, you can use the phpMyAdmin "UploadDir" feature to upload the file (again by SCP, SFTP, FTP, or whatever other file-transfer means you prefer), then import directly through phpMyAdmin. Since you have command-line access, I wouldn't personally do it, but you could.

About the broken packages, the most likely thing I can think of is that you may have modified the apt sources list, introducing incompatible dependencies. I suggest settling on one release and using the packages provided by that. You can also download phpMyAdmin directly and uncompress in to your web root using the Quick Install guide.

Answered By - Isaac Bennetch