Ubuntu – Upgrade vs Clean Install

It's a bug in initscripts, fixed in Natty, which copies the current state of motd to /etc/motd.tail. motd is dynamically generated whenever you boot but motd.tail is static (allowing a sysadmin to place some fixed information there for all users).

Deleting motd.tail will fix the issue temporarily but a better solution is to create an empty motd.tail. If the file doesn't exist then it may be created again (incorrectly) when initscripts is upgraded.

Create an empty motd.tail with

sudo touch /etc/motd.tail

It appears to me that it is fglrx, the proprietary ATI binary driver, that isn't compatible with the 3.4 kernel. dkms is trying to process the headers for interfacing with it. I assume its trying to compile an interface module.

This makes a certain amount of sense since Ubuntu gets new vendor drivers sometime in the development cycle for new releases and 3.4 isn't in a production Ubuntu release. I believe the Ubuntu kernel team's website mentions that binary only drivers might not be compatible with these packages.

Since you are experimenting I'd suggest that you remove the fglrx driver and use the default radeon one in your current system, and then try the updgrade again. Without fglrx installed there shouldn't be a dkms hook to rebuild anything fglrx related.

After you get it going you might look to the quantal archives for a more up to date fglrx package that would be compatible with the 3.4 kernel. Then you will really be on the cutting edge (or really out on a limb).

You might also see Nvidia drivers don't work with mainline kernel for what someone using an nvidia proprietary driver did.

If it's any encouragement I was able to upgrade to 3.5 for a while in the last week, but I don't run fglrx. I did have to reinstall a libllvm package to keep unity-3d working and never found out why.