Installation hangs upon reaching the wvdial package

[Alex Vancina]

Binary package hint: wvdial

When installing Gutsy Tribe 5, the installation process goes smoothly until reaching the point where the wvdial package is configured. At that time, the system appears to hang and no further progress is made, thus making it impossible to install Ubuntu.

[MSFree (sevingt)]

You can work around this bug by physically removing the modem from the machine before installing/updating. I suspect most if not all of the people experiencing this have "soft" or "win" modems by Lucent and some other companies. The installation hangs when "configuring wvdial" as it tries to communicate with the modem. After removing the offending hardware the installation will move past that point in a few seconds and finish in a few minutes. If you connect to the internet through your ethernet card and don't need to use any other telephony applications then removing the modem is of no consequence - just make sure to cover the slot. If you need to use the modem you can still remove it before installing, then put it back in afterwards and try to configure the software manually.

Be Open Source

[Bob Grant (bgublp)]

This bug is still around in Hardy Alpha6. I just did a fresh install on a oldish Dell Optiplex GX110 and had it hang on the wvdial configuration step. I started a shell and found that the last process was:
wvdialconf /etc/wvdialconf
which i believe was called from
/bin/sh /var/lib/dpkg/info/wvdial.postinst configure

Once I killed the former 'wvdialconf' process the installation continued just fine.

Let me know if there is anything else I can provide.

[c-h-h (c-h-heidrich)]

Upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 LTS

-> see Bob Grants message

The upgrade stopped when installing the wvdial package. An interrupt with <strg+c> forced the program to continue but it could not finish successfully: No cleanup and automatic reboot. Booting the old kernel in recovery mode was possible.

I suggest to change this procedure: either the upgrade process can detect the DHCP server and can configure eth0 e.g. - there is a (A)DSL connection! - or there should be a choice to skip the installation of wvdial.

CHH

[Marcus Sonestedt (mackeyar)]

I just want to say that this 12 year old bug hit me when installing qt5-qmake on Windows 10 WSL just now.

Had a few virtual serial ports.