Continuing on from the broken Ubuntu installation, for some reason some packages are failing with messages like “Subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 245”
Looking in the post-installation scripts in /var/lib/dpkg/info/[PACKAGE].postinst there is a call to gconf-schemas and if you run that manually, dmesg will report gconftool-2 segfault.
The problem is that if the LOCALE is not set to English UTF8, gconftool-2 will randomly segfault on certain schemas (personally I think this was a huge error that somehow got through testing). The solution is pretty simple… either change the locale to en_US.UTF8 for any new bash shell with bashrc through:
export LANG=en_US.UTF8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF8
To check that locales are now correct, use
Or, since gconf-schemas is a python wrapper for gconftool-2, go change the code of gconf-schemas:
1. Find where gconf-schemas is
2. Edit the code, find where the script defines the variable ‘env’ for launching a subprocess, and add new dictionary entries (append to the end, dont forget to add a , to the current dict):
'LC_ALL':'en_US.UTF8',
Now resume any installation, these errors should go away