I don't know whether this is known bug. It is the first thing I come across when installing KDE3, so I can imagine it is. kubuntu-desktop-kde3 depends on ttf-bitstream-vera but it's not available anymore in karmic as you can see here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/nl/jaunty/ttf-bitstream-vera Here is a patch: http://haar.student.utwente.nl/~julius/patches/no_ttf-bitstream-vera.patch I just removed the package from the dependencies. This allows me to install everything, but somehow also brings in some KDE4 packages on my system. Another option would be to add this package to the KDE3 repository.