It was a machine at home rather than a VPS, but has this bug - <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1771999> - caught anyone here? The plymouth script of update-initramfs fails because pango is in a different directory to the one it expects: update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-8-generic Warning: No support for locale: en_GB cp: cannot stat '/usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/module-files.d/libpango1.0-0.modules': No such file or directory cp: cannot stat '/usr/lib/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-basic-fc.so': No such file or directory E: /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/plymouth failed with return 1. update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-8-generic Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6.38-8-generic (--configure): I'm somewhat surprised that a) the relevant bug was marked as fixed in Ubuntu's launchpad three months ago, but it's still affecting people (me) now, and b) leaving you with a system that won't boot into the kernel with 11.04 is apparently considered 'low' impact. A cure is to link where it is and where it's expected to be: sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pango /usr/lib/pango (the former is /usr/lib/x86-64-linux-gnu/pango for 64 bit systems) and try again. Ian