Wrong nice value while upgrading debconf

[Kenneth Karlsson]

Binary package hint: adept-manager

After installing Feisty I tried to upgrade with adept-manager.

After a short time a dialog appeared complaining that debconf had the wrong nice value. It requested that I enter one between -19 and 20. No field was available to enter this number so I cancelled.

Since then I can no longer run adept-manager because it complains that another package is using the database.
Tried a restart but that didnt help. I assume there is some type of lock file somewhere but it was not in /var/lock.

Regards Kenneth

[Yuriy Kozlov (yuriy-kozlov)]

This happened to me as well while installing updates on a fresh install of herd 4.

[Luka Renko (lure)]

Yep, I have also seen this couple of time after fresh install of Herd4.

[thomas coopman (tmske)]

I also had this after a fresh install of herd4.

[Dave Shuck (dshuck)]

I had the same problem and I am attaching a screen shot. I was able to fix the issue by running update-manager

[Paul Dufresne (paulduf)]

In bug #68267, I suggest a possible fix to x11-common.
Mainly, to replace:
  if [ $? -ne 2 ]; then
by:
if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
in validate_nice_value () of the config script.

[Mitch Golden (mgolden)]

I too see this bug. There were about 390 packages to upgrade today, and they all downloaded. When it started up, it gave me the "nice" popup.

Below is a version of what was displayed in the main window - that is, not the popup. (Actually it was from a later crash.)

The first package to fail was bash. I went to a command line and did

sudo apt-get update

and it told me to do a

sudo apt-get --configure -a

which I dutifully did.

Then I re-ran adept-updater and it got further, but when it reached x11-common it had similar problems. This I fixed again with the apt-get --configure -a , but adept-updater still wouldn't work. So this time I just finished the upgrade on the command line

sudo apt-get upgrade

and it went fine. Afterwards, there was no further packages shown by adept-updater. I had noticed that adept was one of the packages that had been reinstalled, and I used adept to install firefox. It worked, but I still saw the "DESTROY created..." message below.

Extracting templates from packages: 100%
DESTROY created new reference to dead object ' Qt::VBoxLayout', <> line 342 during global destruction.
Preconfiguring packages ...
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDrive
r/Stack.pm line 104, <GEN19> line 3.
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDrive
r/Stack.pm line 104, <GEN39> line 4.
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDrive
r/Stack.pm line 104, <GEN39> line 9.
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDrive
r/Stack.pm line 104, <GEN39> line 17.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
(Reading database ... 75336 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace debianutils 2.17.4 (using .../debianutils_2.17.4build1_i386
.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement debianutils ...
Setting up debianutils (2.17.4build1) ...

...