Nvidia driver removed on upgrade -> Unity won't work

[Roy]

I upgraded to 12.10 this morning, restarted the computer, logged-in, and then Unity launcher and the top-bar didn't show up.

However, the desktop was ok and I could open guake. Because I noticed before the upgrade that nvidia-current was going to be removed I tried to reinstall it using apt-get and it fixed the problem.

That might be also a problem in fglrx, which was the replacement, but as I have a Nvidia card it probably shouldn't be installed at all in first place.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: update-manager 1:0.174.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-16.25-generic 3.5.4
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-16-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Oct 3 09:39:28 2012
GsettingsChanges:
 b'com.ubuntu.update-manager' b'first-run' b'false'
 b'com.ubuntu.update-manager' b'launch-time' b'1349249601'
 b'com.ubuntu.update-manager' b'show-details' b'true'
 b'com.ubuntu.update-manager' b'window-height' b'655'
 b'com.ubuntu.update-manager' b'window-width' b'500'
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20110211.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: update-manager
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-03 (0 days ago)

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

Thanks for having reported this bug and helping in making Ubuntu better and sorry for having your report unanswered for so long.

 It seems that was caused the error you observed is described in the following line of the file "main.log" that apport attached to the report:

2012-10-02 20:03:12,094 DEBUG nvidiaUpdate()
2012-10-02 20:03:14,092 ERROR NvidiaDetection returned a error: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'experimental-304'

Do you remember if you had any special nvidia driver installed when you did the upgrade or you were just using the ones provided by Ubuntu?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

It seems to have been one provided by Ubuntu - https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-experimental-304

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

NvidiaDetection comes from nvidiadetector

DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeCache.py: from .NvidiaDetector.nvidiadetector import NvidiaDetection

which is part of ubuntu-drivers-common, so the bug lies in that package. I seem to recall a similar bug in jockey.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Actually, ubuntu-drivers-common only exists since quantal. So this would actually be nvidia-common and we can see a fix for this bug here:

nvidia-common (1:0.2.44.2) precise-proposed; urgency=low

  * NvidiaDetector/nvidiadetector.py: When a package has multiple words
    separated with -'s, use only the last element as the driver version.
    (LP: #1047681)

Given that this was released on 10/2, and what we can see in DpkgTerminalLog.txt, its likely that the user did not have the fixed version of nvidia-common installed.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

However, there is a 2nd issue here:

2012-10-03 09:01:21,174 DEBUG running Quirks.PostCleanup
2012-10-03 09:01:21,180 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: './xorg_fix_proprietary.py'
2012-10-03 09:01:21,267 ERROR got error from PostInstallScript ./xorg_fix_proprietary.py (Failed to execute child process "./xorg_fix_proprietary.py" (No such file or directory))

Which I believe is a duplicate of another ubuntu-release-upgrader bug.