Comment 7 for bug 1001189

I'm not particularly familiar with the inner workings of man-db, but as far as I can see both versions of man-db use "libgdbm3 >= 1.8.3", so I wouldn't expect there to be a .db-file format change between Lucid and Precise, off hand. But it does seem like "extra" man files are in play, somehow...

You might check for differences in the environment variable lists between the different environments, in particular the LANG and LC_* variables.

Based on what the "man" man page says: you could try "man -u" and see if that complains about any of the index files. Also, I guess "man" looks for a config file in $HOME/.manpath; do such files exist in your NIS accounts?

If not, the /etc/manpath.config file's MANDB_MAP lines appear to list the directories where man looks for the index files (in the CATPATH column).

Or, it might be easier to run man under "strace" and just see directly what file it's trying to open or process when it dies...

Nathan