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maki57
Asked: 2014-10-18 02:32:14 +0800 CST

UnicodeDecodeError crashes update-manager and gnome-language-selector

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I tried to update one day and update-manager crashed with:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/update-manager", line 114, in <module>
    app = UpdateManager(data_dir, options)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py", line 113, in __init__
    self.options and self.options.use_proposed)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/UpdateManager/MetaReleaseGObject.py", line 44, in __init__
    MetaReleaseCore.__init__(self, useDevelopmentRelease, useProposed)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/UpdateManager/Core/MetaRelease.py", line 93, in __init__
    cache = apt.Cache()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 107, in __init__
    self.open(progress)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 172, in open
    self._set.add(pkg.get_fullname(pretty=True))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

Restarting sometimes makes update-manager work and when it does, it's aptd that crashes with the a UnicodeDecodeError in the last 3 lines as above according to the apport window.

I thought updating had the same problem here. There were no dot files described by the first answer and manually going through the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d showed no garbage text, but there were files that had nothing in them. Thinking it's a locale problem, I ran gnome-language-selector and it crashed with:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gnome-language-selector", line 22, in on_activate
    options=options)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py", line 196, in __init__
    self.updateLanguageView()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py", line 709, in updateLanguageView
    self.openCache(progress)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/LanguageSelector.py", line 33, in openCache
    self._cache = LanguageSelector.LangCache.LanguageSelectorPkgCache(self._localeinfo, progress)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/LangCache.py", line 76, in __init__
    apt.Cache.__init__(self, progress)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 107, in __init__
    self.open(progress)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 172, in open
    self._set.add(pkg.get_fullname(pretty=True))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

Thinking it was related to this, I ran locale and got this:

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8

So I assume it's not the same ASCII/UTF-8 conflict problem. Is there a way to fix this or at least help me find what's wrong?

It's been happening for a few weeks, but it doesn't crash often enough for me to think it's a big problem because I could always update some other day. It might become a bigger problem, though, so I'm asking just in case.

14.04

0 Answers