Re: Debian and Unicode line drawing

[Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com>]

On Tue, 01 Apr 2014 07:14:24 -0400 (EDT), Aleksander Kurczyk wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am using PuTTY, Maybe it's not a new software but it works properly
> with other distributions (CentOS/Fedora etc.) that uses Unicode by
> default.
> 
> I noticed that every frame in default Debian configuration in PuTTY
> is displayed as the rows of ppppppppppppp and qqqqqqqqqq instead of
> those frame ASCII characters.  PuTTY and every of my Debian
> installation is set to use Unicode UTF-8 encoded characters so ncurses
> etc. should use those characters to display frames instead of this
> vt100 escape code and ppppppppp/qqqqqqqqqqq after it.
> PuTTY and KiTTY is expecting this and not those vt100 compatible
> characters.  PuTTY/KiTTY can use those vt100 charasters without any
> problems but not in the Unicode mode.  In this mode it expects
> normal UTF-8 characters.
> 
> I can make ncurses applications use Unicode characters with the
> variable "export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1" set in my .bashrc.
> But not all applications uses ncurses.  For example dpkg-reconfigure
> still uses those vt100 escape code and ppppppppppp/qqqqqqqqqqqqq
> characters.  How can i make it Unicode compatible?

I recently encountered this problem myself, and I did some more research.
Here's another solution.  Try it and see if it works any better for you.
In Putty configuration, make the following changes:

Window -> Translation -> Remote character set : UTF-8
Window -> Translation -> Handling of line-drawing characters: Use Unicode line-drawing code points
Connection -> Data -> Terminal type string : putty

With these settings, you don't need the environment variable

   NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1

set.  (By the way, /etc/profile.d/local.sh is a better place to put this,
if you're going to use it.  This makes a system-wide change.  But with the
PuTTY settings above, you don't need it.

I am unable to reproduce the problem you are having with dpkg-reconfigure.
Perhaps you would be so good as to give the name of a specific package that
you are trying to reconfigure in which you have the problem.  I tried
reconfiguring locales, and the box-drawing characters seemed to be working
just fine.

-- 
  .''`.     Stephen Powell    
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