nvidia-304-update (video driver) got uninstalled and is uninstallable after update to HWE-Stack5 (from Ubuntu LTS 12.04.4 to 12.04.5)

[Holger Kiffmeyer]

I didn't take notes, so I can't give the exact error messages. My working video-driver (nvidia-304-updates) was uninstalled during the installation of the last HWE-Stack. Afterwards, with the new Kernel (3.13) I had only 1024-resolution. Nouveau driver was installed, but without 3d-Support. I tried to reinstall nvidia-304 (or any other nvidia-driver) but it showed me broken dependencies. nvidia-304 wants to install a program (something with ...abi ) in Version 11 to 14, but the last xserver-xorg-package containing this program was the raring-Version, so I couldn't install it. Had to revert to the last HWE-Stack.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Steve L (v-steve-1)]

I can't install 304 either as it gives me this error:

 nvidia-304-updates : Depends: xorg-video-abi-11 or
                               xorg-video-abi-12 but it is not installable or
                               xorg-video-abi-13 or
                               xorg-video-abi-14

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

[kamiccolo (kamicc)]

The same applies to nvidia-331:

    The following packages have unmet dependencies.
     nvidia-331 : Depends: xorg-video-abi-11 or
                       xorg-video-abi-12 but it is not installable or
                       xorg-video-abi-13 or
                       xorg-video-abi-14
    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Even though kind a unstabilish nvidia-331-updates is being installed properly.

[Flint (follettorama)]

The same thing happened to me. nvidia-304 was uninstalled during the update and I am unable to install them.

[Marco Paganini (paganini-launchpad)]

This problem hit me hard today. Problems like this definitely diminish the user trust in the Ubuntu upgrade process.

The solution was a painful manual rollback, using the output of "dpkg --get-selections" from before the upgrade (this old habit has saved me in more than one occasion). Getting my system back to an operational state required considerable effort. Please give this problem a high priority, as it's bound to affect a lot of people.