iulian mitrică: Remote access to linux via SSH using Putty (and draw lines correctly)

Update 2014: Actually, it's pretty simple to solve all these things, when using Ubuntu 12.04 (US English) and Putty 0.63. I didn't check other distros. Configure Putty like this:
- Terminal >> Keyboard >> The Function keys and keypad = Linux
- Window >> Translation >> Remote Character set = UTF-8
All works great!

When logged in from a Putty terminal, some programs render correctly the bars made of characters using in putty UTF-8, while others render them correctly using ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe) in Putty settings. ~~I haven't found a nice way to deal with this problem, and~~ I'm gonna keep a log of programs' preferred way.

UTF-8: hddtemp, links, links2, lm-sensors, mc, moc, smartmontools,
ISO-8859: alsamixer, elinks, iptraf, mp3blaster, sysv-rc-conf, wavemon

Keep in mind that this is related to the way server's locale is configured. My server locale shows the following output:

server:~# locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

What to do: configure ssh client in other systems (Putty) to use UTF-8 and match server's locale to get nice display of man pages and character bars of some programs. The optimum settings I have found so far are the following:

- Window >> Translation >> Remote Character Set >> UTF-8
- Connection >> Data >> Terminal-type string >> linux

Other Putty settings I choose to alterate from default:
- Lines of scrollback = 900
- Window title (i.e. "[root@server1.example.com]", without quotes)
- Auto-login username (i.e. "root", without quotes)
- Enable compression
- Permit only protocol version 2