Broken dpkg dialogs

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:14:43 -0800
Chris Dean <ctdean at kyluka.com> wrote:

> 
> >> I'm having a problem with the dialog boxes that are drawn when I use
> >> dpkg (or apt-get).  
> >
> > Not quite sure what you mean here - do you mean the curses-based debconf
> > boxes that sometimes pop up for configuration? (Debconf questions etc) ?
> 
> Yes, exactly.
> 
> >> Any ideas on how to fix this?
> >> 
> > I'm just guessing here: might it be a utf-8 encoding issue? I don't know
> > without checking if the Mac terminal supports utf-8. Or as above, is it a
> > lack of ncurses libraries on the Mac ? (i guess the latter isn't likely
> > since you say it works fine with Debian though)
> 
> I was also thinking it was an encoding issue.  Do you know how to
> change the encoding to ISO-8859-1 ?  At least that's something I could
> try.

An easier solution, perhaps, might be to enable ssh X forwarding and do

ssh -X you@$serveraddress xterm 

(or gnome-terminal or whatever Ubuntu
terminal you prefer), with X11 running on your mac, of course. I tried this
on my iBook and it appears to work OK....

This way the whole apt operation runs on the Ubuntu box, including the
terminal itself.

Worth a try if you have X11 installed on the Mac.

Peter


-- 
Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small
epiphanies. -- Neal Stephenson