I have a red circle with a white bar through it on my top tool bar stating 'Error marking the upgrade' and 'E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.'

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Hi I have the same red dot with a white line through it on the top of the screen.
The same "'E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.' 'Installed packages have unmet dependencies'" error message. The error is from the update manager. I am running Ubuntu 12.04 for months with
no errors.

-peterp

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

 I did some investigating of my system.
There seemed to be 3 packages left over
after I removed the Evolution mail system
about a year ago. I assumed that another application
needed these packages.

evolution-common evolution-indicator evolution-plugins

 I manually removed these packages and did a manual
update and upgrade from the command line and all
seems to be working again.

-peter

I also just got this issue. I ran apt-get check and autoremove and some of the other apt-get options. Finally on the GUI update manager it gave the same error and after clicking Install it popped up with the send error report and the following message in a differnt window:

"Package dependencies cannot be resolved

This error could be caused by required additional software packages which are missing or not installable. Furthermore there could be a conflict between software packages which are not allowed to be installed at the same time.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

libnspr4: "

Using synaptic I could not mark the above dependency for reinstallation, but I could for upgrade. After trying that it stated that I had to fix broken packages first. I marked it for removal, but it then wanted to remove a ton of other stuff, but overall it is used by Mozilla.

Upon running:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install libnspr4

The following error was shown:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libnspr4 : Breaks: evolution-plugins (< 3.2.0-0ubuntu2) but 2.32.2-0ubuntu7 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

As typical, the Ubuntu Software Center does not show I have Evolution installed (as I do not use it), but was able to remove left over files from when it was installed from a previous distro. Synaptic to the rescue again. The big red icon is now gone and no error occurs.