nonsequential upgrades

[nanog]

GDM is borked in 11.10 and breaks non-sequential upgrade via apt/dpkg. You should remove it and its deps before upgrading from lucid, maverick, etc..

Upgrading with the iso fixed the broken deps and also worked well with a vanilla lucid install. I have not looked at the installer script but I am willing to bet that it's removing stuff prior to package install.

[arpanaut]

Do you know that lightdm is replacing gdm in OO?

See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/ReleaseNotes
go down to Updated Applications

Could this be the root of your issues?

[nanog]

yes, i've been testing 11.10 since day 1.

i've been doing non-sequential upgrades since breezy. this is the first time i've had a major issue. i confirmed that the deps could be nuked via chroot, which is in essence what the installer is doing.