Strange terminal behaviour
Nikhil Nair
nnair at pobox.com
Wed Jan 9 18:44:11 UTC 2013
Hi there,
I'm a recent convert to Ubuntu, using it on a remote server; the
Linux-based server I have at home runs a very old version of Debian. I
connect from a Windows XP-based laptop running SecureCRT and/or PuTTY.
I'm using a regular text-based terminal - not X Windows.
I'm getting a strange problem with non-VT100 characters being used on the
terminal, despite the TERM environment variable automatically being set to
"vt100". It's odd since, with identical Windows terminal setups when
connecting to both machines, I get the issue on the Ubuntu machine but not
on the Debian one.
The easiest way to trigger this is by attempting to compile a C program
with undefined references (e.g. a variable that wasn't declared), using
gcc. The single quotes around the variable name should be written as
ordinary apostrophes, and that's what happens on the Debian box; but on
the Ubuntu one, it's attempting to do something fancier: on PuTTY, they
both look the same (they come out as an A circumflex...), whereas with
SecureCRT, they're both displayed as three characters - the opening one is
A circumflex, Euro, tilde, and the closing one is A circumflex, Euro,
trademark.
This sort of thing is more than a slight nuissance to me, as I'm blind,
and these weird symbols mess with my screen reader. They're even more of
a problem in ncurses-style interfaces (several of which are used by
configure scripts when installing packages...).
All I've checked about the terminal setup, as yet, is the TERM environment
variable, with is set to "vt100" on both machines. I don't know enough
about this sort of thing to know what to check next, or where to look up a
solution in the documentation, so any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Nikhil.
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