distribution upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 failed while setting new software channels

[(JR)²]

Binary package hint: update-manager

I installed 8.04 from a CD then upgraded it to 10.04, then tried upgrading to 10.10.
I'm using standard x86/i386/32-bit versions of Ubuntu.
The only significant change I've made since upgrade from 8.04 is installing the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

To answer the question about what I expected to happen: I expected the upgrade to 10.10 to complete without any issues

To answer the question about what happened instead: I got an error titled "Could not calculate the upgrade" with the following message:

   An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
   E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

    This can be caused by:
    * Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
    * Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
    * Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

   If none of this applies, then please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bug report.

Unless the NVIDIA display driver that was downloaded and installed via the "Hardware Drivers" program is "unofficial" software, none of issues mentioned in the error message apply.

The error message said to include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/. I'm not sure how to do that.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: update-manager 1:0.134.11
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-28.55-generic 2.6.32.27+drm33.12
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-28-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Feb 5 11:21:16 2011
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: update-manager

[Manfred Hampl (m-hampl)]

This can be a duplicate of bug 658458 (and a dozen similar ones)

If the package xserver-xorg-video-nouveau is installed, in several cases the 10.04 to 10.10 upgrade fails with the error message

"Could not determine the upgrade
An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
This can be caused by:
* Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu"

Several persons have reported that after removal of that package the upgrade was successful.

Try this workaround: Open a terminal and enter the command:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

and try the upgrade again.

[(JR)² (thefirstshrewdgeek)]

That worked. Thank you!