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

[Olivier Mengué]

Here is a screen capture of the blocking Debconf dialog that appears during the upgrade on an amd64 system (I have upgraded 2 computers so far and have not seen that on the i386 one): this is during the libc upgrade.
At that moment the glibc does not seem to be available (I have not been able to launch the usual screen capture applications because Gtk relies on glibc so I did use xwd for the capture), so that's probably the reason of the Debconf dialog downgrade.
Combined with #663457 this is a major issue on netbook systems.

** Attachment added: "Capture of a blocking Debconf dialog in the terminal during 11.10 to 12.04 upgrade"
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/979661/+attachment/3133549/+files/capture-DistUpgrade-debconf-libc.png

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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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