On Thursday 15 May 2008, Frank Griffin wrote:
> From last night's cooker update:
> >   12/31: sweeper
> > #############################################
> > rmdir: failed to remove `/etc/X11': Directory not empty
> >   13/31: x11-server-common
> > #############################################
> > error: unpacking of archive failed on file /etc/X11: cpio: rename
> > failed - Is a directory
>
> When the updated system was rebooted, nasty surprise: it looked like
> half of X couldn't find the other half. Configuring GDM seemed to work
> fine, but once you close the configuration dialog, your changes are
> quietly lost. Logging in to GNOME can't find anything and gives errors
> about falling back to a default GNOME configuration. Lots of errors
> from everywhere about files in /etc/X11 and its subdirectories that
> cannot be found.
>
> Not much of a bug report, I know, but there was so much going wrong it
> took a while to even guess at what was going wrong. If this isn't just
> an "oh, sh**" that will be corrected in a few hours, I can do more
> structured testing.

On my box /etc/X11 was not completely deleted. A symlink was created to the
new location in /usr but was named X11abcde (can't recall the exact
alphanumeric string). X refused to start. Deleting /etc/X11/ and renaming
the symlink to X11 got things working normally.

I also saw that the X update was still shown as an available update. (I
assume that the installation was incomplete.) After renaming the symlink I
then installed it again and this time the installation seemed to complete
correctly.

(I use the GUI tools for updating and so can't report whether there were any
error messages or not.)

Jim