apt-get error “E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.”

The problem you have encountered is basically the package, or dependencies that are conflicting or broken and are therefore “held”.

You can check what (if any) packages are held using the following command:

dpkg --get-selections | grep hold

or

apt-mark showhold

If there’s no packages, or no output. That means it’s probably a dependency issue which apt-get isn’t able to resolve. apt-get is actually pretty bad at dealing with the dependencies and it’s often easier to try install via aptitude (an alternative to apt-get, which is widely regarded as a better solution to the default apt-get.

Solution:

First install aptitude:

sudo apt-get install aptitude

and then install the package:

sudo aptitude install [package_name]