Comment 4 for bug 606526

On Sat, 2010-07-17 at 20:40 +0000, drew212 wrote:
> Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
> Ubuntu better. This bug did not have the correct package associated with
> it as you suggested in your last comment; so I have assigned the correct
> package, checkbox.
>
> For future reference: If the application doesn't have a Help > Report a
> Problem... menu then you can use "ubuntu-bug [packagename]" in the
> terminal to open a bug report that lists the correct package.
>
> ** Package changed: firefox (Ubuntu) => checkbox (Ubuntu)
>

This is a round-about way of reporting a bug, but I can't seem to get
into launchpad. I did log in but firefox closed unexpectedly and now I
can't seem to get anywhere except a page titled openID transaction in
progress which tries to load but times out. Seems you can't get there
from here.
Anyway -
what I am trying to report seems to be a bug in the update program
aptBackend.py or Backend.py. When doing an update a window opened with
the text -

Error Type: <type 'exceptions.TypeError'>

Error Value: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer,
exceptions.SystemError found

File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/apt/aptBackend.py, line 2216, in
<module>

main()

File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/apt/aptBackend.py, line 2213, in
main

run(args, options.single)

File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/apt/aptBackend.py, line 2175, in
run

backend.dispatcher(args)

File : /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/packagekit/backend.py, line 699,
in dispatcher

self.dispatch_command(args[0], args[1:])

File : /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/packagekit/backend.py, line 606,
in dispatch_command

self.refresh_cache(force)

File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/apt/aptBackend.py, line 202, in
_locked_cache

func(*args, **kwargs)

File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/apt/aptBackend.py, line 1498, in
refresh_cache

format_string(error.message))

File : /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/packagekit/backend.py, line 723,
in format_string

txt = unicode(text, encoding, errors='replace')

What any of this means, I don't know, but hopefully someone will get
this message and know what to do with it.

Sorry for this but I didn't know how else to report it.
  Roy (<email address hidden>)