When I use apt to get a package, I have been receiving the same error message. Here is an example trying to install wicd (which is already installed):

    Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
wicd is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
3 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Setting up tex-common (2.06) ...
debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog
debconf: (Dialog frontend requires a screen at least 13 lines tall and 31 columns wide.)
debconf: falling back to frontend: Readline
Running mktexlsr. This may take some time... done.
No packages found matching texlive-base.
dpkg: error processing tex-common (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of texlive-binaries:
 texlive-binaries depends on tex-common (>= 2.00); however:
  Package tex-common is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing texlive-binaries (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of dvipng:
 dvipng depends on texlive-base-bin; however:
  Package texlive-base-bin is not installed.
  Package texlive-binaries which provides texlive-base-bin is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing dvipng (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
Errors were encountered while processing:
 tex-common
 texlive-binaries
 dvipng
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I'm not sure if this is a problem with apt or with dpkg, but it certainly doesn't look good!