Thanks to jrtc27, I learned about a workaround: The segfault is not specific to pbuilder, but rather aptitude crashes under qemu-user.
The reason sbuild works is just that sbuild happens to use a different resolver by default (probably there is a way to make sbuild use aptitude, which then *presumably* also crashes). To make pbuilder use apt instead of aptitude as resolver, put the following line into the .pbuilderrc (see pbuilderrc(5) for more info) PBUILDERSATISFYDEPENDSCMD=/usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satisfydepends-apt best regards Stefan
