Can't upgrade to 14.10

I am running 14.04 Desktop. I am not a command line jock.
I followed the instructions to upgrade to 14.10, i.e., run Upgrade Manager.
Upgrade Manager gave me "An unhandlable [sic] error occured"
'There seems to be a programming error in aptdaemon, the software that allows you to install/remove software and to perform other package management related tasks'

I tried Partial Install, that seemed to do nothing.

So I tried again, and then hit Settings when I got the error message box listed above.
It said: "Software index is broken"
'It is impossible to install or remove any software. Please use the package manager "Synaptic" or run "sudo apt-get install -f" in a terminal to fix this issue at first.

I don't have Syaptic installed so I did the command line option. The results were:

jim@jjs-XPS-8700:~$ sudo apt-get install -f
[sudo] password for jim:
sudo: unable to open /var/lib/sudo/jim/14: No such file or directory
W: Not using locking for read only lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
jim@jjs-XPS-8700:~$

I then tried running the recommended dpkg command and got:

jim@jjs-XPS-8700:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
[sudo] password for jim:
sudo: unable to open /var/lib/sudo/jim/14: No such file or directory
dpkg: error: unable to access dpkg status area: Read-only file system
jim@jjs-XPS-8700:~$

Help! I just want to upgrade to 14.10. I have not done anything fancy with my system. I only installed 14.04 last month.

Thank you.

P.S. I then tried to install Synaptic and it failed.

"There seems to be a programming error in aptdaemon, the software that allows you to install/remove software and to perform other package management related tasks."

DETAILS:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 282, in _process_transaction
    self.fix_incomplete_install(trans)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1019, in fix_incomplete_install
    with self._frozen_status():
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/contextlib.py", line 59, in __enter__
    return next(self.gen)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1156, in _frozen_status
    frozen_dir = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix="aptdaemon-frozen-status")
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tempfile.py", line 426, in mkdtemp
    dir = gettempdir()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tempfile.py", line 370, in gettempdir
    tempdir = _get_default_tempdir()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/tempfile.py", line 312, in _get_default_tempdir
    dirlist)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No usable temporary directory found in ['/tmp', '/var/tmp', '/usr/tmp', '/']