Hello,

I am a first time Linux mint( 14 Nadia) user.

My problem initially started with my laptop screen displaying in what looks like a thermal filter for photo editing, after hibernation. A friend walked me through a means to fix the problem, however somewhere down the line I broke my ppas so Synaptic no longer functions. I was told at this point I might as well reinstall/upgrade the OS. After installing unetbootin, I received an error message "7z not found. This is required for either install mode.
Install the "p7zip-full" package or your distribution's equivalent." I downloaded "p7zip_9.20.1_src_all.tar.bz2" but I have no idea where to go from there. I can only boot from USB as my CD drive is broken.

The first thing you should do is open the Mint software center (whatever they are calling it these days) and search for 7zip for Linux. If it's in the repos ("software repositories") and you select to install it, Mint will just install it for you. Since it's Mint 14, it may still have the Synaptic Package manager easily accessible--that would be more efficient to search than some bloated "software center."

What you downloaded is the sources (source code). You can install from sources, but it is ever so much easier to install from the repos.

Here's Mint's Guide to Installing Software: http://helpsite.org/install-software-in-linux/