On Ubuntu, you may upgrade your system to the next (development) release by issuing update-manager -d either on a root shell or using sudo. However, using the graphical interface gives you no diagnostic output in case anything fails. For example, you get 
which is not helpful at all, as upgrading to a development version is exactly what the -d switch of update-manager is supposed to do.
In this case, you should start doing the upgrade manually, as the output of the command line tools is both more verbose and detailled. First of all, you have to update the package sources. For the update from 13.04 to 13.10, the command is
sed -i 's/raring/saucy/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
The following apt-get update will complain if you got an error message like the one shown above. In my case, the MATE repository did not respond properly to saucy package requests. Disable the external repositories for your update which is started by apt-get dist-upgrade.