Comment 2 for bug 366920

I already fixed the Problem.
I was also unable to change themes, icons, mousepointer etc.
Problem of all that was that in 8.10 i removed ubunu-desktop due to some stupid dependency issues.
So during dist-upgrade ubuntu-desktop package was not installed, which partly broke the upgraded system as described.(notify not installed, theme switching impossible, icontheme switching impossible)
So due to missing ubuntu-desktop meta package, notify-osd did not get installed.

Upgrade process should maybe take that in account and reinstall all needed meta packages.

After fixing it manually, all works fine again.