Boost install with apt-get fails

Question

I am trying to install the boost libraries through libboost-all-dev:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev 
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 resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 libboost-all-dev : Depends: libboost-date-time-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-filesystem-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-iostreams-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-locale-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-log-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-regex-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-system-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-thread-dev but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libboost-wave-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Any clues on how to find the broken packages?

Answer 1

This is more of an alternative than a fix to your problem.

When it comes to boost I never use the libboost-all-dev install. It rarely works and it does not actually install EVERY boost library.

What I would recommend is installing synaptic:

sudo apt-get install synaptic

and from within synaptic search for "boost" and just manually select all the relevant boost libraries.