I had possibly a similar problem, except that I got more information about the
installation failure each time I used
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
and then zoneminder attempted to complete its installation: Then I saw
the error was "no database zm". I checked apache and mysql
zm 1.22 was running fine on Ubuntu 9.04. After upgrade to 9.10, then to
10.04LTS, I used synaptic to add the latest zm package and all it needs,
and this error occurred at the end of the installation attempt.
--
package zoneminder 1.24.2-2build3 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess
installed p