I tried to help by doing a system upgrade. During that process not all package were downloaded correctly. This caused the upgrade to be aborted. A later retry tells me that I have now broken packages and will not proceed.

[pnatte]

Binary package hint: update-notifier

Doing a release upgrade via a terminal interface gives the following messages:

piet@laptop-1:~$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new ubuntu release
Done Upgrade tool signature
Done Upgrade tool
Done downloading
extracting 'lucid.tar.gz'
authenticate 'lucid.tar.gz' against 'lucid.tar.gz.gpg'
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
tar: /etc/apt/preferences: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Reading cache

Checking package manager
Reading package lists: Donem karmic/partner Packages: 93 ages: 93
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done
Done downloading
Reading package lists: Done
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done

Updating repository information
WARNING: Failed to read mirror file
Done downloading

Checking package manager
Reading package lists: Donem lucid/partner Packages: 93 ages: 93
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done

Calculating the changes

Calculating the changes

Could not calculate the upgrade

An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

This can be caused by:
* Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

If none of this applies, then please report this bug against the
'update-manager' package and include the files in
/var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bug report.

Restoring original system state

Aborting
Reading package lists: Donem karmic/partner Packages: 93 ages: 93
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done
Reading state information: Done
piet@laptop-1:~$

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Apr 12 12:55:09 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/update-notifier
Package: update-notifier 0.90
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-20.58-generic
SourcePackage: update-notifier
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-20-generic i686

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.