Trivial errors (incorrect locale in my case) stops the OS from booting

[Hamid A. Toussi]

I copied the following file [*] to /etc/default/locale and after rebooting I received the message

init: mountall process terminated with status 2
a maintenance shell will now be started
...

when I enter mountall in the maintenance shell, the OS continued to boot

I replaced the modified /etc/default/locale with the original version of the file and it solved problem

/etc/default/locale [*]

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=""en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"

[Hamid A. Toussi (hamid2c)]

I am using Lubuntu 13.10 (amd64)

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This is not an upstart bug, it's a bug in the mountall upstart job. When /etc/default/locale is broken to the point that it's unparseable by the shell, the job will fail with an error like:

: 11: /etc/default/locale: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

To avoid these parse errors breaking the shell would require testing the parseability in a subshell, which in turn requires mountall to be switched to a different service readiness protocol. So this is unlikely to be fixed soon.