This is pretty stupid and I wish I could go back in time...
I installed cryptsetup and also ticked the boxes for mandos-client and busybox (I know now - I should'nt) and find myself with ubuntu-standard uninstalled thanks to busybox as I found out later.
The behavior I have now is pretty similar to this description when I install/update packages.
Trying to reinstall ubuntu-standard via Software-Center (where removing busybox was noted as condition for installing ubuntu-standard) and command line had the same result.
What is the best way to get ubuntu-standard back and clean up to be able to install/update properly again?
My Ubuntu version is 14.04 LTS.
Thanks for reading - I hope someone has an idea.
Michael