Alt + Tab freezes progress bar

[Pete Savage]

Press alt tab during any progress bar whilst installing, installation totally freezes. Keyboard is still responding as Ctrl+Alt+F4 gets to console, and F2 enables a shell to be created. This was tested on i386.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Reproduced in VMware. Probably a bug in either cdebconf or the underlying newt library.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Which version of Ubuntu were you using back then? Is this still an issue for you?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This bug should not have been closed. Asking for more information should happen by setting the bug to Incomplete (although I am the relevant developer and do not need more information, so don't do that!), NOT Invalid.

[Alon Swartz (alonswartz)]

We came across a similar issue, might be the same.

Our installer (di-live) uses debconf to interact with the user, which in turn uses the available debconf frontend, which happens to be whiptail (ie. newt).

When the key combination ALT + *anykey* (not only tab) is pressed, whiptail will exit with code 255.
This is easily reproducable at the prompt:

    $ whiptail --yesno test 20 50; echo $?
    press ALT + *anykey*

BTW - the same issue is present in dialog, so the problem is probably not in newt itself...