"Fatal IO error 11" (XServer crash) after launching Thunderbird

I experienced exactly the same issues with both the nvidia proprietary driver not being installed correctly and nouveau crashing the xserver frequently (for me, it was every time I started chrome or firefox).

I am much obliged to both of you for the solution!

However, I am disappointed that Ubuntu let such a critical and hard-to-diagnose bug (for non-experts) get into the 12.10 release. For me, this started when installing the nvidia 3rd party driver as the first step after a clean install of 12.10.

I've been using Ubuntu since Dapper and have never had this issue before.

It's not fair to blame this on Ubuntu. A kernel interface to NVIDIA binary driver has to be built against the specific kernel version. This is why the linux-source package has to be installed to provide needed linux headers in certain cases. But linux-source is not always necessary provided linux-header-xxx-generic has been installed. So it's a hardware dependent thing. It's obviously not appropriate to install linux-source by default on every desktop.

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Originally Posted by funicorn

It's not fair to blame this on Ubuntu...

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I disagree. Ubuntu provides a *simple* mechanism for installing the Nvidia non-free drive via their GUI (i.e. Settings -> Software Sources -> Additional Drivers). A single click and off it goes and downloads and installs the driver. If the kernel headers and source are a dependency, then they should be automatically downloaded and installed too, just like dependencies of any other package being installed.

This is clearly broken in the 12.10 64-bit desktop.

It's not that simple. It's difficult to establish a precisely in-control dependency pattern when the unsolved dependent issue is hardware-dependent. You have to include an exclusive hardware list which correctly triggers the self-adapting mechanism. This is never possible for the open source developing chain, because It needs a lot of testing under various hardware platforms by a lot of people. If you go across all the development of Linux desktops, you may agree with me on that point. That's the intrinsic drawback of any open source project, even for the ones hold by the entire community, which generally consists of less than 1% of the total users.

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Originally Posted by funicorn

It's not that simple. It's difficult to establish a precisely in-control dependency pattern when the unsolved dependent issue is hardware-dependent...

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If the single-click-to-install button can't be made to work for the majority of ubuntu's target hardware, then they shouldn't implement it. Period. Broken features are *worse* than missing features.

But, while I'm no expert and maybe I'm missing something, the dependency issue is already solved. You yourself provided the solution: simply make the packages linux-source, linux-headers, and linux-image dependencies of nvidia-current. The hardware dependencies are already taken care of by apt.

Worked for three of us at least!

Yes you missed one key point, single click works for the majority, and linux-source is only needed by a few modules on NVIDIA cards, mostly the newest ones.