Failed to load terminal capabilities from '/etc/termcap'

[basilb27]

Binary package hint: gnome-terminal

Open terminal and get following output

*** VTE ***: Failed to load terminal capabilities from '/etc/termcap'
basil@ubuntulaptop:~$

nothing typed at the prompt does anything and I appear to have damaged the terminal but can't find any info on this error.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Sep 16 23:38:45 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-terminal
Package: gnome-terminal 2.18.0-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcCmdline: gnome-terminal
ProcCwd: /home/basil
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
Uname: Linux ubuntulaptop 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Fri Aug 31 00:55:27 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. Looks like a problem on your installation since other people would have reported the issue otherwise

[basilb27 (info-computerwhisperer)]

I Re-installed the two vte library applications, libvte9 and libtve-common and the terminal is working again. I had the xubuntu desktop installed and when I removed this it must have damaged these 2 applications.
All sorted now, thanks for the advice

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Closing the bug then, that looks like an incorrect installation and is fixed now

[Matthew (matthew-redhat-bugs)]

Upgrading to vte-0.27.1-1.fc15.x86_64 and then opening a new instance of my running gnome-terminal resulted in the following error:

*** VTE ***: Failed to load terminal capabilities from '/etc/termcap'

This is because the running libvte is looking for /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm and the new libvte provides /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm. This will affect any running applications using VTE over the upgrade. A backward compatibility symlink would avoid it.

[Alecz20 (alexguzu)]

I just want to add that this also happened to me when booting from Live CD.

[Antono Vasiljev (antono)]

Same bug appeared on Natty after one sudo apt-get upgrade. For history. Will provide more info if i found.

[Antono Vasiljev (antono)]

Affect all running applications after upgrade. This solution was mentioned in redhat-bugzilla:

This is because the running libvte is looking for /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm
and the new libvte provides /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm. This will affect
any running applications using VTE over the upgrade. A backward compatibility
symlink would avoid it.

[Bryan Hundven (bryanhundven)]

I can confirm the issue and resolution that Antono demonstrated in comment #7.

[Florian Rathgeber (florian-rathgeber)]

I can confirm this bug after a Natty upgrade this morning. The symlink suggested by Antono fixes the problem for now.

[Antono Vasiljev (antono)]

Btw simple reload of terminal fixes this error message. But i think in ideal Ubuntu it should not appear at all :)

[Aigars Mahinovs (aigarius)]

It is also a bit more than just annoying. On my computer during natty upgrade my gnome-terminal did not have the enter key, so effectively it was non-functional until I added the simlink. If the upgrade were to break for some reason, I would have a system with an non-functional teminal.

[Jerry Ablan (lucifurious)]

Extremely annoying.

Just to provide more info for others with this issue...

1. Ctrl-M and Ctrl-J will "ENTER" your commands.
2. Arrow keys do not work

Add this symlink to correct the issue temporarily:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm

[CooL LeO (coolleo83)]

I also confirms that creating this soft link gets this error sorted. I got this error immediately after upgrading to the Natty today.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm

Thanks for updating with this with the useful info.

[Tom sparks (tom-a-sparks)]

I attempted to Re-installed the two vte library applications, ( libvte9 and libtve-common )

the installer crashed with

E: /var/cache/apt/archives/libvte-common_1%3a0.23.5-0ubuntu1.1_all.deb: unable to stat `./usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm' (which I was about to install)

[Stefano Rivera (stefanor)]

This was because dpkg won't replace a directory with a symlink. Debian fixed it in 1:0.28.1-2. We should merge that for precise, and do some SRUs to natty and oneiric.

[Stefano Rivera (stefanor)]

Err, actually, not worth SRUing. It only affects running programs.

[Fedora (fedora-redhat-bugs)]

This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database. Reassigning to the new owner of this component.

[Kevin (kevin-redhat-bugs)]

Does this bug still happen?

I've not seen this error...

Can you re-open this if you still are seeing it?

[Robert Grønning (slimg)]

Currently, termcap is symlinked with termcap-0.0 (I didn't touch anything)
root@torgerde:/usr/share/vte# ls -l /usr/share/vte/
total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Dec 12 20:05 termcap -> termcap-0.0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 22 09:40 termcap-0.0

But I still get the following errormessage when opening terminal, and my arrows do not work.
*** VTE ***: Failed to load terminal capabilities from '/etc/termcap'

This happened after apt upgraded today, so the culprit should be in the attached aptitude.log

[Robert Grønning (slimg)]

I'm on Ubuntu 12.04
Linux torgerde 3.2.0-18-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 9 21:36:08 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Robert Grønning (slimg)]

Seemed to solve itself after closing all terminal-windows that were running

[Andrei Emeltchenko (andrei-emeltchenko-finik)]

I see this bug in Ubuntu 12.04

[nicomen (mendoza-pvv)]

bug also happening in 12.04 for me

[Daniel (dlenz-lenzcom)]

same here

[dskecse (dskecse)]

The same error when I try to switch to tmux from xterm. Xubuntu 14.04.