Few month ago I’ve messed around with a bunch of launchpad debs for Nvidia’s VDPAU support, and it supposed to happen I’ve installed more or less accidentally the nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 (don’t ask my anything about it). From this day on, I’ve occasionally tried to get rid of it, but didn’t succeed. Every time I’ve tried to install e.g. nvidia-glx-180 or something, I’ve got one of these errors (full log) slapped into my face:

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
A package failed to install.  Trying to recover:

Running the update-manager -d on a Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope x86_64) in order to get onto Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64) I ran into this error again, but now I had to solve it.

Now it turned out if you have one of these divert patterns:

dpkg-divert: `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.1.xlibmesa by nvidia-glx-190' clashes with `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.1.xlibmesa by nvidia-glx-180-opengl3'

you can unravel it by doing the following:

dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.1.xlibmesa /usr/lib/libGL.so.1

and after every apt-get install something run, you can repeat this unless no more error messages show up.

In my case I had to do all of these:

dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib/nvidia/libglx.so.xserver-xorg-core /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib32/nvidia/libGL.so.xlibmesa /usr/lib32/libGL.so
dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib32/nvidia/libGL.so.1.xlibmesa /usr/lib32/libGL.so.1
dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib32/nvidia/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa /usr/lib32/libGL.so.1.2
dpkg-divert --remove --rename --package nvidia-glx-180-opengl3 --divert /usr/lib/nvidia/libGLcore.so.xlibmesa /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libGLcore.so