[PlanetCCRMA] problem with synaptic

[joakim verona]

Hello,

Synaptic used to run fine, but now it fails after a while in startup, 
showing a little dialog which only says "null".

I've tried lots of things to get it working, like cleaning the package 
list of things that looked broken and re-installing
synaptic and so on.

My question is really: is there some other way to get the package list 
to choose packages to install?

apt-get install XXX is good enough for me, but how do I determine which 
XXX:s there are to choose from?

Cheers,
/Joakim