What has gone wrong if this error message appears AFTER apt-get has finished downloading and installing packages?

...
Processing triggers for menu ...
Error: Timeout was reached 

This was on a Debian Wheezy/Sid.

3

2 Answers

I had the same problem as you:

$ sudo apt-get --reinstall install intel-microcode
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required: linux-image-686-pae
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove it.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 426 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 sid/non-free intel-microcode i386 1.20130222.5 [426 kB]
Fetched 426 kB in 11s (36.8 kB/s)
(Reading database ... 283637 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace intel-microcode 1.20130222.5 (using .../intel-microcode_1.20130222.5_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement intel-microcode ...
Setting up intel-microcode (1.20130222.5) ...
Updating microcode on all online processors...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.9-1-686-pae
Error: Timeout was reached
$

Then was thinking that initramfs has something to do with it, with a hint that I got from the dpkg.log file.

2013-07-13 13:54:57 startup archives unpack
2013-07-13 13:55:09 upgrade intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:09 status half-configured intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:09 status unpacked intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:09 status half-installed intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:10 status half-installed intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:10 status unpacked intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:10 status unpacked intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:11 startup packages configure
2013-07-13 13:55:11 configure intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:11 status unpacked intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:11 status unpacked intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:11 status unpacked intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:12 status half-configured intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:12 status installed intel-microcode:i386 1.20130222.5
2013-07-13 13:55:12 status triggers-pending initramfs-tools:all 0.113
2013-07-13 13:55:12 trigproc initramfs-tools:all 0.113
2013-07-13 13:55:12 status half-configured initramfs-tools:all 0.113
2013-07-13 13:55:44 status installed initramfs-tools:all 0.113

Hence I proceed to reinstall the initramfs-tools package using apt-get --reinstall install initramfs-tools and now the message got silent.

$ sudo apt-get --reinstall install intel-microcode
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required: linux-image-686-pae
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove it.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/426 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
(Reading database ... 283637 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace intel-microcode 1.20130222.5 (using .../intel-microcode_1.20130222.5_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement intel-microcode ...
Setting up intel-microcode (1.20130222.5) ...
Updating microcode on all online processors...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.9-1-686-pae
$ 

I don't know the exact reasons for it (nor how to reproduce it) and google don't help in that matters, but I left here a possible solution. But if I had to do a wild guess, maybe the timeout was due the triggers that timed out since for both, it happened after some triggers were used (menu in the case of OP, update-initramfs in mine).

Running the following commands worked for me:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update

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