said Dan Youngquist via tde-users:
| You're trying to install them with apt. You may have missed the | instructions on that page to manually download and install them: | | "Manually install debian keyrings from packages.debian.org (search | debian-keyring and debian-archive-keyring packages, get the download | link, wget it and do dpkg -i debian-*.deb on the machine."
Thanks -- still puzzled by the wget aspect -- thought that was merely another way to get a package. anyway, that, done like that, seems to have done the trick. Still a lot of stuff blowing up, but I suppose I can sort through that. If not, I may never be heard from again. Don't everyone applaud at once.