What does the colon (:) and dash (-) in an Ubuntu dpkg version number mean?

The number before the : is the epoch. This overrides the version for ordering purposes, e.g. 3:3.1 is considered newer than 2:3.2. It’s used when a packager needs to downgrade a package in the repos for one of various reasons. The number (value, really) after the – is the release. It differentiates between different releases … Read more

dpkg: error processing package mysql-server (dependency problems)?

dpkg returning an error code 1 doesn’t mean anything specific but it usually has to do with dependency issues. In your case, you tried to install two versions/instances of the same package i.e. mysql-server and mysql-server-5.7. So do the following to remove any redundant dependency issues and install a functioning mysql package sudo apt-get clean … Read more