Upgrade manager wants me to do a partial upgrade

It looks like sudo dpkg --configure -a is the magical command.

Here is the dpkg man page’s explanation of the --configure -a options:

--configure package...|-a|--pending

Configure a package which has been unpacked but not yet configured. If -a or --pending is given […], all unpacked but unconfigured packages are configured.

[…]

Configuring consists of the following steps:

1. Unpack the conffiles, and at the same time back up the old conffiles, so that they can be restored if something goes wrong.

2. Run postinst script, if provided by the package.

I'd suggest trying this:

sudo apt-get install aptitude
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

Solved the issue for me, probably will work for you as well.

I had the same problem. What I did was, obtain the list of packages from sudo apt-get upgrade. In my case:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

Then I installed the "not upgraded" packages with sudo apt-get install linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic and problem solved.