Sunday, May 6, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10 - rcconf needs dialog or whiptail

RCCONF is a TUI (text user interface) utility that lets you configure the services and daemons that are launched at system start-up.

When you install it on Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10 and then launch, it returns the following error:

"rcconf needs dialog or whiptail"

Dialog and whiptail are utilities to display user-friendly dialog boxes from shell scripts. Despite the fact that whiptail comes preinstalled with the system, rcconf doesn't run.

Solution 1:

install dialog:

sudo apt-get install dialog

Now launch a terminal, and run rcconf.

Solution 2:

Whiptail is already there, but not in the folder the apps try to launch it from (see the comment by Viajemotu below). All you need to do is to create a symlink to the app in the /usr/bin directory. To do so, execute:

$ sudo ln -s /bin/whiptail /usr/bin/whiptail

After this, run rcconf.

9 comments:

  1. how about "sudo apt-get install whiptail"?

    ReplyDelete
  2. 'whiptail' is pre-installed on the system. It's installed but didn't work for 'rcconf', so installing 'dialog' solved the issue.

    dpkg -l | grep -i 'whiptail'

    ReplyDelete
  3. you can also create a soft link:

    $ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/whiptail /bin/whiptail

    whiptail was changed in Ubuntu starting in precise to let other programs work even on systems where /usr is not available

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sry, wrong command, I meant:

      $ sudo ln -s /bin/whiptail /usr/bin/whiptail

      Delete
    2. thank you for your comment. will update the post to include this solution as well. thanks.

      Delete