Troublesome Paraview installation with 12.04 LTS (and not with 14.04 LTS)

As I try and install Paraview on a desktop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with

sudo apt-get install paraview

I receive a lengthy warning, whose most worrisome part is

The following packages will be REMOVED:google-earth-stable ia32-libs ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libhdf5-serial-1.8.4 libqt4-opengl:i386 libvisual-0.4-plugins:i386 nvidia-331-updates skype skype-bin:i386 xorg xserver-xorg

which seems to me rather excessive and greedy since it's aiming to remove some other important and unrelated packages such as Google Earth or Skype. Obviously I don't continue.

The interesting piece of information is that the same apt-get command runs smoothly and without such auto-immune demands on another machine operated by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS where, for example, both Google Earth and Skype are installed too.

I have reasons (left) to have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on the first computer. The question is then: is anybody aware of the causes of this auto-immune behaviour of Paraview? What could be fixes and workarounds?

NB I could not create a 'Paraview' tag owing to my young forum age, but a senior member may find it useful to do so.

Thanks for spotting this.

I partly solved the problem but run into bigger ones with Brasero. I'll explain in steps.

1. sudo apt-get install paraview:i386 did not conflict with skype or google earth indeed, but required the installation of new libraries apt-get could not completely take care of;




2. I then uninstalled skype and google earth and installed paraview:amd64 allowing it to remove libraries -- the installation of Paraview went well.




3. However, reinstalling either skype or google earth required multiarchitecture libraries anyhow. Moreover, apt-get started to demand several dependencies one after another. apt-get itself suggested to do a sudo apt-get -f install, which I did. Fixing broken links took a little longer and I saw some applications disappear from the menu bar. However, on the whole, this was beneficial since Paraview, Skype and Google Earth were working properly.




4. Finally, I decided to reinstall the programs that had ben removed by step 3, namely Brasero with a sudo apt-get install brasero.




5. Here come the troubles as apt-get on brasero asked to remove something like a hundred applications. Mistakenly I thought that these were application to add so I gave leeway to it. As a result brasero showed the same autoimmune behaviour of Paraview earlier. With more havoc though: it immediately affected the internet connectivity (the browser could not find any URL). On reboot, moreover, lightdm had also been compromised.

I will now create a separate incident report to describe this further.