Comment 9 for bug 1153342

The problem is indeed that the file /etc/machine-id does not exist. You can work around the problem by creating it using the following command:

dbus-uuidgen | sudo tee /etc/machine-id

The file /etc/machine-id does not exist on Ubuntu machines because it is related to systemd. The official command for generating this file would be systemd-machine-id-setup, but it is not available on Ubuntu, so I abused dbus-uuidgen to achieve the same result. See http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-machine-id-setup.html

network-manager should probably be patched such that it does not rely on the existence of this file.