Corrupt 12.04 automatic update

[Joe Bissett]

Hi Colin,

On 5/9/2012 7:17 AM, Colin Law wrote:
> If you are able to open a terminal then do
> sudo apt-get update&&   sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> which will bring everything up to date, which may or may not help.

Well, thanks to you, it's progress, but not perfection. :-) :-)

Doing the above improved my situation, but I still have a very unstable 
machine.  Various errors which do not necessarily repeat themselves.

Something knocked out my internet connection through my router, but I 
fixed that.  That was when I saw an error message flash by containing 
the word Daemon.  On my last try I was able to open FireFox and look at 
e-mail.

The drop down menu sometimes say there are updates, and sometimes it 
says it is up to date.  In either case, I am at least able to open the 
update manager, which always says I have 109 updates waiting.  Sometimes 
it gives a size of 21.8 MB, and the last time it said 1 MB.

The same old System program problem detected error message keeps popping 
up and shutting down whatever I'm trying to do.  But I am still unable 
to follow the prompts and Report Problem.

Sometimes the GUI is knocked out, with the screen showing lines of text 
which appear to be status, rather than code.  Sometimes the text starts 
with a line that is right justified, stating that it is Checking battery 
status.  Strange, since this is a Dell desktop.

So... my "newbie" analysis say we fixed a few things, but there still 
appear to be serious problems rendering the machine unusable for normal 
activity.

I've tried to determine some repeatability in the errors, but aside from 
the System program problem detected error, there does not seem to be a 
regular error pattern.

So, if you have any ideas based on this random information, I await your 
counsel.

Joe