Comment 3 for bug 165011

I'm not a n00b. This happened also to me, and while I'm confortable with quite a bit of Linux administration I have used nothing but the Ubuntu happy-wrappers for many months. They typically work great. I'm on 6.06 still.

I strongly suspect there is a real bug underlying this; possibly triggered by e.g. doing multiple "download and install" cycles when prompted, but postponing one of the required reboots.

Regardless, running the synaptic packagage manager rather than just the update manager produced a more helpful error message, that dpkg had struggled and the correct commandline to proceed. To recover, (adding sudo) at the command line I ran:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

entering my password when prompted.

Note that I had killed the update-notifier previously during debugging of the problem. I have no idea if that was related; I doubt it but wanted to give full disclosure.