VMWare tools does some hackery inside the initramfs dir which causes problems for package management..
Package broken;
$ apt-get install mtr Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: zerofree fakeroot libdumbnet1 dkms Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following NEW packages will be installed mtr 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 8 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/50.8 kB of archives. After this operation, 188 kB of additional disk space will be used. Selecting previously unselected package mtr. (Reading database ... 178071 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking mtr (from .../mtr_0.80-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Setting up initramfs-tools (0.99ubuntu13.1) ... cp: not writing through dangling symlink `/etc/initramfs-tools/modules' dpkg: error processing initramfs-tools (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Setting up mtr (0.80-1ubuntu1) ... Errors were encountered while processing: initramfs-tools E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
This fixes the problem;
$ cd /etc/initramfs-tools/ root@b1:/etc/initramfs-tools# rm -f modules root@b1:/etc/initramfs-tools# mv modules.AfterVMwareToolsInstall modules
Package now works;
root@b1:~# apt-get install mtr Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done mtr is already the newest version. The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: zerofree fakeroot libdumbnet1 dkms Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 8 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Setting up initramfs-tools (0.99ubuntu13.1) ... update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-28-generic
Can a core dev please fix this.
Thanks
Cal