Comment 11 for bug 79320

As expected, the installation failed before the cleanup phase. The error message that appeared in the box was "installPackages() failed".

I ran sudo dpkg --reconfigure -a and vim, nano, mc, vim-tiny, ubuntu-standard and ubuntu-minimal were configured with no error. It seems that the system is now in a clean state. ubuntu-* were left unconfigured because they depended on vim and/or nano.

Following with sudo apt-get dist-upgrade removed the 2.6.17 kernel docs and replaced them with the 2.6.20 ones. Doesn't seem related.

ubuntu-desktop was installed in the Edgy phase and was updated correctly by the update manager, so no problem there.

sudo update-manager -d -c did not report any new distribution available.

Now for an interesting fact. All four failing packages do so because of the postinst script returning exit code 2. So it's probably some problem with the scripts. There are two possibilities:

 - A common syntax error in them. bash returns 2 if it finds a syntax error in a shell script file. I don't think this is a good explanation, because if there was a "hard" syntax error on the postinst files, it should happen always, not only when upgrading.
 - All four postinst scripts have in common the use of the alternatives mechanism. Specifically, all four invoke update-alternatives, which is the only common command among them other than the shell constructs. Is there any possible event which would make the alternatives mechanism not work during part of the update? It might pay to investigate a bit further.

Thanks, Jose