kubuntu installer crash

[Ben Shelton]

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 112, in ?
    install(sys.argv[1])
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 52, in install
    ret = wizard.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/kde-ui.py", line 305, in run
    self.process_step()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/kde-ui.py", line 719, in process_step
    self.process_disk_selection()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/kde-ui.py", line 771, in process_disk_selection
    if self.manual_choice is None or unicode(choice, "utf-8") == self.manual_choice:
TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

[Oded Arbel (oded-geek)]

I had the same crash, see Bug #43890. I don't know why it does this (its not supposed to), but from reading the code I don't see how it cannot crash when choosing manual partitioning - if unicode() isn't working (as the exception seems to suggest) then using it any time will surely crash the installer.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. This is also bug 43125, which I fixed on Friday; try a current daily build (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/).

Oded: The error message is not easy to read correctly. What it actually means is not that Python can't handle Unicode at all, but that it can't use the unicode() function to decode a string that is already of type 'unicode', rather than being an encoded stream of bytes in e.g. UTF-8. In other words, the problem was simply that unicode() was being called twice on the same thing.

[Oded Arbel (oded-geek)]

Ah. thanks for the explenation and the fix :-)