Cannot install anything because of dependencies. (ubuntu)

Question

Hey so my web server on my vpn was not sending out any emails via php and so I tried installing quite a few packages and they all started giving me this error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libc6 : Depends: libc-bin (= 2.13-20ubuntu5)
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

Is there anything I can do to fix this?

EDIT:

When I try and install the latest libc using

 apt-get install libc-bin/stable

It just tells me it cannot find it

root@server1:~# apt-get install libc-bin/stable
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Release 'stable' for 'libc-bin' was not found

Answer 1

Ufff when a Debian/Ubuntu get messy with the packages is not a good thing :S

The first I would do is make a backup, just ins case...

Then you can try the apt-get -f install but I guess it will not work...

Well is a little bit drastic solution but use to work and it's easy ;) You can remove libc-dev and libc-bin. You can check before what dependencies they have check if you are going to remove something incredibly important to you that you won't be able to live without it a few minutes. Immediately after this you reinstall those two packages.

After that you should be able to do an update and an upgrade without dependencies problems. But please be extra-careful as I said messing with packages and dependencies in Debian could be catastrophic...

Good luck!