On Oct 26, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Jape Person wrote:
I'm sure you were right to first suspect locale settings. It's really the most obvious culprit. Are those the same for the systems that have the problem and those that don't?
In all, "egrep -v ^# /etc/locale.gen" says "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8".
I'm looking forward to seeing what you learn about this. As I said, I know I've seen the behavior before and have been mystified by it, but only briefly because it went away (IIRC) after a reboot.
Well, I'll be damned! That grep returned the same string on all but the Lenny box -- and on that one, the only difference was that it said the same thing twice.
I looked at the file on Lenny, and the locale was un-commented out at place up in the long list of commented out choices, and it was added as a last line. I edited on one of the Wheezy boxes, and the locale choice was only the last line. So I found it (commented out) up in the list, removed the '# ' and rebooted.
And Aptitude got well.
I have no explanation whatsoever for this, but thanks very much for your suggestion.
...
OK. I give up. I just spent the afternoon doing the same things on the other Wheezy boxes (directly from their consoles), and some of the locale.gen files were one way, and some weren't; after editing, sometimes Aptitude worked from the console, and sometimes it got worse. Then I went back to the Mac and restarted the terminal program on the Mac and re-established the ssh connections, and now they're all OK from the Mac. They weren't from their consoles. And ssh'ing around between them gave various results.
Last time I looked.
If somebody has a possible explanation for this, I'd sure like to hear it. But unless I do, I'm just going to assume that Aptitude makes its dialog boxes from character sets selected at random and stop whining about it. As long as it does the rest of its job reasonably well, I can live with cosmetic problems...