Comment 27 for bug 458061

i was able to run into this "permission denied" problem with Ubuntu 14.04
i tried this:
  apt-get purge openntpd apparmor
  apt-get install openntpd apparmor
and i even tried to set "rw" file rights for everybody...

let's do a wild guess some service has opened and locked (exclusive access) the file in question.
and this service is not neccessarily having the char sequence "ntp" in its body.
  "ps fax | grep ntp" did not return anything that might be a server to me.
trying:
  sudo lsof /etc/openntpd/ntpd.conf
this line returned only a fuse-warning of probable incompletness to me - nothing else.
even no report at all when using fuser instead of lsof.

running "openntpd" with sudo from the command line creates the very well known permission error.

checking this:
  sudo ls -l `which openntpd`
return this:
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Dez 24 2013 /usr/sbin/openntpd -> ntpd

deleting the symlink and retrying the partial installation suddenly seems to succeed.

is the uninstall/install having a problem with a leftover symlink pointing to ntpd?
doing a re-install from that state... failed again! and the symlink got recreated.

stopping here - feeling puzzled... but it looks like the openntpd package itself is the problem.