Comment 13 for bug 1553230

I've just hit this trying to do a wily to xenial upgrade in Virtualbox on Xenial. This happened shortly after the font cache was regenerated. If I switch to tty3 with ALT+F3 and back to tty2 everything is back to normal (this wasn't immediate, 3-5 minutes later).

After this occurred, I switched to tty3 and ran ps aux | grep dpkg and I could see packages still being installed. I think Nikita got "E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem." message because the VM was restarted shortly after this issue occurred. Nikita, could you confirm?

The gnome-shell did not crash, it looks more like the display was being reinitialized. I was able to remove obsolete packages after packages were installed and asked to reboot. This issue doesn't seem to persist across a reboot either.

Nikita, did you install the Virtualbox Guest Additions when you ran the upgrade?

Also, distribution upgrade logs are located under /var/log/dist-upgrade.

I will rollback to wily, install the virtualbox guest additions, reboot then upgrade to see if missing guest additions could be the cause.

Logs attached.