[Bug 979661] Re: oneiric to precise: debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome and falls back to Dialog

[jackel]

i'd like to know if what i experienced on 3 different updates in the
last 2 days,  is this bug or if something else needs to be reported?

i suck explaining things in detail, but will give it my best shot:

all 3 upgrades appeared to freeze at the point: "Preparing libc6".   in
the bottom of the update window, there is an option to show details with
a little arrow thing next to it....i had to click the arrow to reveal
the terminal window below, and there i saw that the update/install was
actually prompting me to reply to some question (i cannot remember
exactly what it was, so i will not try to guess), i needed to reply by
saying "ok"....i did that by pressing the "tab" key. that  highlighted
the word "ok" in the terminal, then i pressed "enter" on my keyboard to
complete and continue.

the update would not continue unless i replied to the question. it sat,
apparently frozen waiting for me to press "show details" and answer the
question.

there are 2 or 3 more such prompts before the update completes. the good
news is....the upgrades went flawlessly after that on all 3 computers: a
lenovo T61 thinkpad, a lenovo t410 thinkpad, and a lenovo k330
ideacentre desktop.

...i think the update should open the terminal window automatically when
it gets to that point (Preparing libc6?), as a new user will not know
enough to open the "show details" window to reveal the prompt and
continue.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/979661

Title:
  oneiric to precise: debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome and
  falls back to Dialog

Status in “update-manager” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  I was doing an upgrade from Oneiric to Precise and the machine hung in
  the process. There was a dialog somewhere in the background that I
  didn't see:

  debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Gnome
  debconf: (Unable to load Gtk -- is libgtk2-perl installed?)
  debconf: falling back to frontend: Dialog

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