speech-dispatcher could not be installed when upgrading from Kubuntu 13.04 to 13.10

[Georg Abenthung]

Got an error message while upgrading fron 13.04 to 13.10 (German) "Unterprozess installiertes post-installation-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurü
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ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-09-29 (384 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120820.1)
MarkForUpload: True
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-12.19-generic 3.11.3
Tags: saucy dist-upgrade
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-17 (0 days ago)
UserGroups: adm cdrom debian-tor dialout dip fuse lpadmin plugdev sambashare sudo

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:

  apport-collect 1241211

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

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[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

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[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

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[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

apport information

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

apport information

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

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[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

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[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

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[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This looks like an error with the speech-dispatcher package:

speech-dispatcher (0.7.1-6.1ubuntu3) wird eingerichtet ...^M
Neue Version der Konfigurationsdatei /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf wird installiert ...^M
chown: Zugriff auf »/var/run/speech-dispatcher“ nicht möglich: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden^M
dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von speech-dispatcher (--configure):^M
 Unterprozess installiertes post-installation-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück^M
dpkg: Abhängigkeitsprobleme verhindern Konfiguration von jovie:^M
 jovie hängt ab von speech-dispatcher; aber:^M
  Paket speech-dispatcher ist noch nicht konfiguriert.^M

[Paul Gevers (paul-climbing)]

What I see in the speech-dispatcher.postinst script is the following:

USER_NAME=speech-dispatcher
HOME_DIR=/var/run/speech-dispatcher

if ! id -u $USER_NAME >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  adduser --quiet --system --ingroup audio \
          --home $HOME_DIR \
          --shell /bin/sh --disabled-login \
   --gecos 'Speech Dispatcher' $USER_NAME
  chown -R $USER_NAME $HOME_DIR

Can you tell me if you if you have a speech-dispatcher user in your /etc/passwd and what the home folder is? E.g. "grep speech-dispatcher /etc/passwd".

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

Yes, speech dispatcher-user is available. Here the correspoding line from my passwd:

speech-dispatcher:x:118:29:Speech Dispatcher,,,:/var/run/speech-dispatcher:/bin/sh

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

BUt: The directory "/var/run/speech-dispatcher/" does not exist on my system! I think this might be the problem....

[Paul Gevers (paul-climbing)]

Yes, I think that is a bug in the package, but it does not explain the failure during upgrade, as the failing code IIUC is only called after the call to adduser, which should create it at that time.

I think /var/run nowadays lives in /run which is cleaned on reboot (is /var/run a symlink to /run on your system?)

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

Yes, as you expected: /var/run is a symlink to /run on my installation.

[Georg Abenthung (georg-0)]

and run, of course is a tmpfs, like stated in my /etc/mtab:
tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755 0 0