[Ubuntu 8.10] Need help getting out of odd update manager loop

[David Karr]

I posted on this earlier today on the Ubuntu Forum, but I really could use
some help with this.

I was running along fine with Ubuntu 8.10 for quite a while. Whenever I see
the updates available icon, I always install all updates. I've been fine
with this.

Today, I decided i wanted to install two packages, the "dos2unix" tool, and
the "js2-mode" Emacs package.  I did them both at about the same time, so
I'm not sure which caused my current problem.

I needed to add another repo to get the Emacs mode package.  I added it, but
it complained about a missing pubkey, so I added that pubkey.  When I was
done, both dos2unix and the new Emacs mode appeared to be working fine.

I then noticed that the updates available icon was there.  When I hovered
over it, it said "There are 530 updates available".  Uh, oh.

When I brought up Update Manager, it presented a dialog saying:

"Not all updates can be installed ...", giving me the choice to run a
"Partial Upgrade", or just continue (the choice of which is ambiguous).

At this point, I posted the question about this on the Ubuntu forum.
Someone advised me to run the following commands:

    sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

which I believe is about the same as executing the "Partial Upgrade" that
Update Manager was talking about.

So, I ran the command line, which took about 2 hours to complete (I saved
the output in a file). It appears that only one package failed to install,
which was "x11proto-input-dev". Apparently that package tried to overwrite
/usr/include/X11/extensions/XInput.h', which is also in package "libxi-dev".
When it was finally done, instead of an orange gear, I had the red bang
downarrow, saying that "There are 531 updates available". Big uh, oh.

When I bring up the aptitude GUI, it says again that not all updates can be
installed. I didn't look through the entire list of 531 updates, but it now
lists a security update for the Flash plugin at the top, which wasn't in the
list before. The second one in the list is "acpi", which WAS the first entry
in the list when I did this 3 hours ago.

Now what?
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