question about term

[Zhengquan Zhang <zhang.zhengquan@gmail.com>]

Dear debian community,

This problem has been puzzling me for quite a while.

I use mlterm(a unicode terminal) to connect to servers. but when I
launch mutt or top or something alike in it. It will fail and say
Error opening terminal: mlterm.

Then if I do 'TERM=xterm' and it would work.

I was puzzled how the system detects which terminal I use and how it
changes the TERM env variable. I would appreciate it if someone can
explain to me a bit about this problem.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

-- 
Zhengquan