Strange terminal behaviour

[Nikhil Nair]

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.