I've tried to install aptitude on a clean install of Ubuntu Server 14.04 (on docker) and I get:

Step 2 : RUN apt-get install aptitude

 ---> Running in 257ad5947629

Reading package lists...

Building dependency tree...

Reading state information...

The following extra packages will be installed:

  apt-xapian-index aptitude-common iso-codes libboost-iostreams1.54.0

  libclass-accessor-perl libcwidget3 libept1.4.12 libio-string-perl

  libparse-debianchangelog-perl libpython-stdlib libpython2.7-minimal

  libpython2.7-stdlib libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libsub-name-perl libtimedate-perl

  libxapian22 python python-apt python-apt-common python-chardet python-debian

  python-minimal python-six python-xapian python2.7 python2.7-minimal xz-utils

Suggested packages:

  app-install-data python-xdg aptitude-doc-en aptitude-doc tasksel debtags

  isoquery libcwidget-dev libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-template-perl

  libxml-simple-perl xapian-tools python-doc python-tk python-apt-dbg

  python-gtk2 python-vte python-apt-doc xapian-doc python2.7-doc binutils

  binfmt-support

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  apt-xapian-index aptitude aptitude-common iso-codes libboost-iostreams1.54.0

  libclass-accessor-perl libcwidget3 libept1.4.12 libio-string-perl

  libparse-debianchangelog-perl libpython-stdlib libpython2.7-minimal

  libpython2.7-stdlib libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libsub-name-perl libtimedate-perl

  libxapian22 python python-apt python-apt-common python-chardet python-debian

  python-minimal python-six python-xapian python2.7 python2.7-minimal xz-utils

0 upgraded, 28 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.

Need to get 9754 kB of archives.

After this operation, 49.3 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Abort.

2014/07/26 19:22:30 The command [/bin/sh -c apt-get install aptitude] returned a non-zero code: 1

I've done :

• apt-get update


• apt-get install aptitude.

Can't do apt-get upgrade because throws another error.

So nervous that this doesn't work... Sorry about this.