mkinitramfs /tmp Permission denied???

[oshunluvr]

I had trouble updating the kernel in since installing Lucid and so far I've blamed it on the nvidia driver not being installed properly into the kernel like it was in Karmic.

Today - a new nvidia driver came out and I updated. As it was installing, I opened the text view window in synaptic and saw a flash of "Permission denied." Thinking - "this can't be good", I viewed the apt term.log and sure enough, when attempting to run the update-initramfs script, there's a laundry list of errors:

Processing triggers for libc-bin ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/init-premount/mdadm: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/panic/console_setup: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/local-premount/fixrtc: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/local-premount/ntfs_3g: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/local-premount/resume: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/nfs-top/udev: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/init-bottom/udev: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/local-bottom/ntfs_3g: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/init-top/all_generic_ide: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/init-top/blacklist: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/mkinitramfs: 329: /tmp/mkinitramfs_cMSNY6/scripts/init-top/udev: Permission denied
Processing triggers for python-support ...
Processing triggers for menu ...
Processing triggers for python-central ...
Log ended: 2010-05-11 08:15:34

I don't like the looks of this at all and I'm not sure what to do next. All the permissions look normal, /tmp has plenty of space but I do have the nosuid and noexec options set on the mount point for security. Is that the problem?

At this point - I need to know what commands to enter at the cli to recreate the attempted function of synaptic. I don't want to poke around without knowing what I'm doing! I'm afraid to re-boot!!!