Comment 48 for bug 249340

I hate to be a me-to, but I just upgraded 7 servers to 8.04 and had this problem with one of them. The other 6 went fine.

The server in question was step-upgraded from 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04 with a reboot between each. It runs Nagios. The problem didn't occur until the upgrade to 8.04 was happening (as I'm sure you expected.)

The workarounds listed above helped me get the server back up, but any attempt to add or remove software results in the freeze yet again. I have a broken dependency problem with one of the Nagios packages, but any attempt to fix it triggers the locale generation again and it freezes. Killing the process allows dpkg to continue configuring, but it never stops all the locale related processes.

Even though this is a production server, thankfully the only thing it does is use Nagios monitoring to watch the other servers, so I can live without it for a few days and run Nagios elsewhere. If I'd known about this bug before upgrading, I would NOT have upgraded any of my servers.