whiptail failing in a MultiTerm buffer in Emacs

[Duncan Bayne]

I am running on Ubuntu karmic (development branch) release 9.10.

If I run "sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.1" from within a MultiTerm buffer in Emacs, I am not prompted for the root password. Instead I see the following error:

Unknown terminal: eterm-color
Check the TERM environment variable.
Also make sure that the terminal is defined in the terminfo database.
Alternatively, set the TERMCAP environment variable to the desired
termcap entry.
debconf: whiptail output the above errors, giving up!
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.1_5.1.37-1ubuntu5_i386.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 255
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.1_5.1.37-1ubuntu5_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

When I run the same command from a GNOME Terminal session, I am prompted for the root password and MySQL installs correctly.

I don't know that it's reasonable for apt-get to support being run from within MultiTerm, but the error message is only helpful to users with an understanding of what the termcap library is & why it might be failing.

Perhaps apt-get could raise a warning if it's being run on an unsupported terminal type?

[Mathias Gug (mathiaz)]

Seems to be related the whiptail program. Reassigning to the whiptail package.

[Duncan Bayne (dhgbayne)]

This bug can be closed. I've verified that whiptail now runs with a $TERM type of eterm-colour.

Not sure when in the past 12 years it was fixed though :) :) :)