Cassandra wants 550 updates, error suggests dist-upgrade

[bolox]

this trusty MintCassandra box has been reminding me "a 7.10 upgrade is available" for a while now.

I have faithfully performed the periodic updates, as offered, from day to day, all along.

I am almost ready to put Elyssa on a nicer box, but I want to continue to run this faithful, solid, reliable MintCassandra for a while to come.

THIS PROBLEM came along today, after a rare reboot.
I had mistakenly spelled $ nano nameOf900mBdvdISO.iso
instead of
$ nano nameOf900mBdvdISO.iso.md5
took a long time to show "killed" in the terminal session
so i figured may as well reboot for a clean session (a superstition hard learned from Redmond)

Upon reboot, the little orange Updater said
"there are 550 updates available'

so i go toward the usual Update Manager, and a dialog comes up with no title in the title bar.
In the body the headline says
"Not all updates can be installed.
Run a partial upgrade, to install as many updates as possible."

"This can be caused by:
- a previous upgrade which didn't complete
- Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu
- Normal changes of a pre-release version of Ubuntu"
TWO BUTTONS - [ Partial Upgrade ] [ x Close ]

Although I am cautious to wrangle with vagaries of doing a Dist-Upgrade
i click Partial
after password we get a window (properly) titled Distribution Upgrade
which fails during the Preparation stage.

another title-less window comes up
saying:

"Can't guess meta-package.

Your system does not contain a ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, xubuntu-desktop or edubuntu-desktop package and it was not possible to detect which version of Ubuntu you are running.
Please install one of the packages above first using synaptic or apt-get before proceeding."
- - - - -
I click [ xClose ] on that error window, and it is followed by another title-less window saying,
"Could not calculate the upgrade.
A unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade.
Please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/
in the bugrepoprt."
- - - - -
ubuntu-desktop is not present in Synaptic, and I hesitate to do the
$ apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
in case mintDesktop will get jealous and throw a caniption.

ANY SUGGESTIONS ?

[Husse]

Fine - because if you do the "Upgrade to 7.10" the same happens as I warn about here
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 17&t=12311
However I can't see how a file you are trying to open in nano could influence things
nano should just die, preferably with an error message, in this case
I don't know where the 550 updates came from - seems a few to many
I think it's time for a nice clean install

[bolox]

yes
thank you for your perspective

indeed the 550 updates (also demanding and upGrade [not just upDate] )
is the puzzler and the standing caution here

like mentioned, i am ok/patient to wait until someone comes along and says ..

... something concrete, recognising that sympton, etc ...

meanwhile, don't be shy, better to get a few viewpoints

thanks

p.s: the inadvertent (nano=text-)-editing of that humungous .ISO is simply the most stupid thing to have happened recently, and the drive capacity was not a factor (at that time)
any time a stupidness happens that should not be expected to handle the gaffe, i am long inclined to get a clean reboot, clean session going
that is mostly a redmond conditioning
linux has its share of reboot-necessary ****, too