Comment 7 for bug 451305

I replicated this by purging linux-headers-2.6.31-15-generic and installing linux-headers-2.6.31-15-server. I confirm that when enabling nvidia, I (1) get no warning (confusing), the driver appears as disabled (which is actually correct), and (2) it modifies xorg.conf to point to the new driver (very bad).

(1) is fixed in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Ejockey-hackers/jockey/trunk/revision/581
(2) is fixed in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Ejockey-hackers/jockey/trunk/revision/579

With those two fixes applied, xorg.conf stays how it is, and I get an error message:

   -----------------------------------------------------------
   Sorry, installation of this driver failed.

   Please have a look at the log file for details: /var/log/jockey.log
   -----------------------------------------------------------

This introduces two new strings. If the SRU team thinks that this is not appropriate, I'm fine with not applying this change to the karmic-updates package, but I think an English error might be better than not having any warning at all.

The log file has the entire output of apt, including

  Richte nvidia-185-kernel-source ein (185.18.36-0ubuntu9) ...
  Loading new nvidia-185.18.36 DKMS files...
  First Installation: checking all kernels...
  Building for architecture x86_64
  Module build for the currently running kernel was skipped since the
  kernel source for this kernel does not seem to be installed.

It's unfortunately buried amongst a lot of other noise, but it's very close to the bottom of the file. Grabbing the error message from apt and passing it from the d-bus backend to the frontend will require a much more intrusive fix which I don't recommend for an SRU.