As a newbie I seem to have messed up my upgrade leaving my system in a very unstable state.

I attempted an upgrade from 8.04LTS which ended in an error about libc and kernel upgrades. I tried to upgrade the kernel but am now unsure if that worked, because when I retried my dist-upgrade there was a lot of errors about pre-dependencies and leaving packages un-configured.

Now I have a system that answers almost every command with:

/lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.8' not found (required by /lib/libselinux.so.1)

I probably should try a complete re-installation, but I'm investigating if there is any possibility of getting a working glibc so that I at least can have some commands working to ensure that my backups are recent etc. before doing the clean install.

not even 'ls' works without saying "glibc_2.8 not found".