On upgrade, X did not start because nvidia module is not available

Binary package hint: nvidia-common

I run the development version of Karmic on my 64 bit machine.

First thing this morning, my machine was running with nvidia accelerated graphics.

Later today I updated with apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade.

The upgrade appeared to go okay. I restarted the machine. It loaded up into a text console.

I logged in, and tried "startx". It failed. I looked in xorg.conf, and commented out the line saying to use a nvidia driver. After this, startx worked but with basic graphics (not accelerated).

I tried going to the Appearance Preferences menu and turning on accelerated graphics. It asked me if it's okay to download a driver and install it. I agreed to this, and something was downloaded and installed. A confusing message implied I should restart the machine to see accelerated graphics. I restarted, and was back in text mode with startx not starting.

"sudo modprobe nvidia" gives me the response "FATAL: Module nvidia not found."

I spoke with StevenK on #ubuntu-devel, and he asked me to file this bug.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Aug 25 12:50:10 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: nvidia-common 0.2.15
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-7.27-generic
SourcePackage: nvidia-common
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-7-generic x86_64