Comment 4 for bug 329111

I had the same problem with OpenERP 6 on Ubuntu (11.04), and figured out what was wrong using strace:

openerp-server is trying to roll over an old /var/log/openerp-server.log to something with the date in the name, like /var/log/openerp-server.log.2011-05-12. It can't do this if the user the server is running as doesn't have appropriate permissions on /var/log, which it probably doesn't if you're running as openerp.

To fix, create a directory in /var/log and set the ownership to the user you run openerp-server as, e.g.:

mkdir /var/log/openerp
chown openerp /var/log/openerp

Then, change the --logfile parameter in the openerp-server commandline to:

--logfile=/var/log/openerp/openerp-server.log

and restart openerp-server.