Newbie question here.
Sorry if I've missed this exact problem in the forum - I tried to search but couldn't find it.

Anyway, after a clean install of Mint 13 Mate on my old Thinkpad T42, I immediately ran into problems with Mintupdate and Synaptic package manager. After some search I was able to update my Mint installation by sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade, and then I ran sudo apt dist-upgrade mintupdate. So far so good.

When trying to launch Synaptic after this it refuses to start. I followed a some tips/hints found in a few forums around, but no avail. To summarize: running the sudo synaptic command in terminal, I get the following error:

(synaptic:4450): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_set_data: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(synaptic:4450): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid (NULL) pointer instance

(synaptic:4450): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_signal_connect_data: assertion `G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed
Memory segment error

Anybody recognize this error or able to point me in a direction? Any help would be greatly appreciated

All the best,
super_68

I'm willing to bet your problem is because when you run dist-upgrade you're actually updating from 13 to 15. Try installing an iso of the current version. You should have more success that way.

Not true at all. The difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade is simply that upgrade will not remove or add programs to the installation, while dist-upgrade will do that. Which repository is used for the upgrade is solely determined by the file /etc/apt/sources.list (and possibly by files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/).
Mint 13 is the LTS version, which is supported until 2017, it should not be necessary to upgrade unless you use hardware that is not supported by the kernel in Mint 13 (in that case a backported kernel might help, if you don't want to upgrade).

@super_68: Did you get any error messages when installing and updating the system?

Hello!

Thanks for all input and feedback
No, no error messages at all during install or upgrade - it went smoothly. I immedieately discovered, when trying to update via Mintupdate, that it did not work. It started and identified packages to be updated, but when I hit install, it terminated and restarted with information that Mintupdate needed to be updated. After that, it didn't work - only restarts when I hit upgrade/install. It still does not work after the "manual upgrade" process via terminal window. I'm running the latest 4.4.7 Mintupdate. Same thing with Synaptic. I discovered that it wasn't working when I wanted to try a Mintupdate fix by reinstalling it via synaptic. Here is what happens when trying to launch Synaptic: prompted for admin password-OK, Synaptic shows for abt 1/2 sec, then terminates/shuts down.

Unfortunately I'm a complete novice to Linux - the above solutions I found via internet. I the solution reinstall and check whether proplem perists?

Rgds,
super_68

Please post the complete output of Please use code-tags for posting that output (see explanation in my signature, if necessary).

Thanks TobiSGD for helping. First of all, I have a Norwegian installation, hence the output is in Norwegian language. I did as you suggested in terminal (see below) - no errors or other mysterious messages. Hope I my posting of output is correct (code tags); I did some reading and figured that I should use the # button from the menu.

The output pretty much translates to this (both) :

Reading packages ... Done
Creating dependencies
Reading state information ... Done
(Calculating upgrade ... Done - dist-upgrade only)
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to be removed and 0 not upgraded.

Hope this is what you asked for

Rgds,
super_68

Same issue with Lubuntu 12.04 (tested with LiveCD). I thought I might have a hardware issue on my old T42, but I tried a few other LiveCD-distributions (Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 9 Gnome) and had no issues. I consider it solved as I now have installed Mint 9 Gnome, which seem to work fine. No issues with Mintupdate nor Synaptic.

Thanks for help and input.

Rgds,
super_68