Nvidia 304 drivers not installing

[Tim Chettle]

when attempting to install 18.04 on a machine requiring the Nvidia-304 driver pack I get the following error

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
[sudo] password for tchettle:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 nvidia-304 : Depends: xorg-video-abi-11 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-12 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-13 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-14 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-15 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-18 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-19 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-20 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-23
              Depends: xserver-xorg-core but it is not going to be installed
              Recommends: nvidia-settings (>= 331.20) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

This is repeatable on two machine i have that require this driver pack a dell M1710 laptop that has a 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G71GL [Quadro FX 3500] (rev a1)
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Release: 18.04

And a sun ultra 20 workstation that has a
07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G71GL [Quadro FX 1500] (rev a1)
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Release: 18.04

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1802015/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

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