If lorax is started with different than C locales, it can fail with errors like: File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pylorax/ltmpl.py", line 387, in installpkg logger.warn("installpkg %s failed: %s",p,str(e)) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 26: ordinal not in range(128) I suggest to switch lorax to C locales to fix that.