Dell N5110 (Q15R) - Jockey silent fail if Synaptic running - stock NVidia drivers on stock Oneiric

It's a nightmare to find out you have to look through a huge log dump to work out what went wrong with a simple driver install.

Turns out Jockey depends on being able to get a dpkg lock, and if another GUI like Synaptic is running at the same time, this will fail in an invisible script running hidden behind the gui, and tell you...

Sorry, the installation of this driver failed.
Please have a look at the log file for details: /var/log/jockey.log

What should happen instead - Jockey should pause and interactively tell you to shut down Synaptic (or whatever package manager has the lock) in order to be able to proceed further. Perhaps easier, it should check on this before beginning the process.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: jockey-common 0.9.4-0ubuntu10
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Jan 4 00:30:21 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release i386 (20111012)
MachineType: Dell Inc. Inspiron N5110
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-generic root=UUID=af952950-f353-4188-9c39-5d5de004eab5 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7
SourcePackage: jockey
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
dmi.bios.date: 05/26/2011
dmi.bios.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.bios.version: A06
dmi.board.name: 0HVRTT
dmi.board.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.board.version: A06
dmi.chassis.type: 8
dmi.chassis.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.chassis.version: Not Specified
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvrA06:bd05/26/2011:svnDellInc.:pnInspironN5110:pvrNotSpecified:rvnDellInc.:rn0HVRTT:rvrA06:cvnDellInc.:ct8:cvrNotSpecified:
dmi.product.name: Inspiron N5110
dmi.product.version: Not Specified
dmi.sys.vendor: Dell Inc.