Failed to load terminal capabilities from '/etc/termcap'

Thank you for your bug. Looks like a problem on your installation since other people would have reported the issue otherwise

I Re-installed the two vte library applications, libvte9 and libtve-common and the terminal is working again. I had the xubuntu desktop installed and when I removed this it must have damaged these 2 applications.
All sorted now, thanks for the advice

Closing the bug then, that looks like an incorrect installation and is fixed now

I just want to add that this also happened to me when booting from Live CD.

Same bug appeared on Natty after one sudo apt-get upgrade. For history. Will provide more info if i found.

Affect all running applications after upgrade. This solution was mentioned in redhat-bugzilla:

This is because the running libvte is looking for /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm
and the new libvte provides /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm. This will affect
any running applications using VTE over the upgrade. A backward compatibility
symlink would avoid it.

I can confirm the issue and resolution that Antono demonstrated in comment #7.

I can confirm this bug after a Natty upgrade this morning. The symlink suggested by Antono fixes the problem for now.

Btw simple reload of terminal fixes this error message. But i think in ideal Ubuntu it should not appear at all :)

It is also a bit more than just annoying. On my computer during natty upgrade my gnome-terminal did not have the enter key, so effectively it was non-functional until I added the simlink. If the upgrade were to break for some reason, I would have a system with an non-functional teminal.

Extremely annoying.

Just to provide more info for others with this issue...

1. Ctrl-M and Ctrl-J will "ENTER" your commands.
2. Arrow keys do not work

Add this symlink to correct the issue temporarily:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm

I also confirms that creating this soft link gets this error sorted. I got this error immediately after upgrading to the Natty today.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/vte/termcap-0.0/xterm /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm

Thanks for updating with this with the useful info.

I attempted to Re-installed the two vte library applications, ( libvte9 and libtve-common )

the installer crashed with

E: /var/cache/apt/archives/libvte-common_1%3a0.23.5-0ubuntu1.1_all.deb: unable to stat `./usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm' (which I was about to install)

This was because dpkg won't replace a directory with a symlink. Debian fixed it in 1:0.28.1-2. We should merge that for precise, and do some SRUs to natty and oneiric.

Err, actually, not worth SRUing. It only affects running programs.

Currently, termcap is symlinked with termcap-0.0 (I didn't touch anything)
root@torgerde:/usr/share/vte# ls -l /usr/share/vte/
total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Dec 12 20:05 termcap -> termcap-0.0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 22 09:40 termcap-0.0

But I still get the following errormessage when opening terminal, and my arrows do not work.
*** VTE ***: Failed to load terminal capabilities from '/etc/termcap'

This happened after apt upgraded today, so the culprit should be in the attached aptitude.log

I'm on Ubuntu 12.04
Linux torgerde 3.2.0-18-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 9 21:36:08 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Seemed to solve itself after closing all terminal-windows that were running

I see this bug in Ubuntu 12.04

bug also happening in 12.04 for me

same here

The same error when I try to switch to tmux from xterm. Xubuntu 14.04.