Some where along the way I started getting:
No usable dialog-like program is installed, so the dialog based frontend cannot be used.
My fix (I believe it's fixed, haven't seen the error so far) was:
sudo apt-get install whiptail
I'm not running root so I have to use sudo. If you are running as root you can omit the "sudo" part.
Hope that helps someone or generates a better solution via discussion. :)