Fun with linux - Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty)

Fix display issue for Midnight Commander, IPtraf and other character-lines-based applications in Putty


When using Putty to connect to a linux machine (ubuntu) from Windows XP, some programs display strange characters (MC, IPtraf, man pages etc.). To make the programs behave correctly you have to set the character set translation in Putty the same as the remote linux.

[1] Check what character set is installed on your distro (ubuntu):
# echo $LANG

Mine is en_US.UTF8.

[2] Change character set translation in Putty:
Open putty >> Cathegory >> Windows >> Translation >> Receive data assumed to be in which character set >> UTF8

NOTE on IPtraf. For some reason, IPtraf refuses to work and it still behaves strange, I guess because it doesn't have support for UTF-8. That's why, in order to fix this, we need to set locale on linux en_US, and for putty to ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe).
To set en_US on ubuntu, edit this file:

# vi /etc/default/locale

LANG="en_US"

To set en_US on Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz) [RedHat], edit this file:

# vi /etc/sysconfig/i18n

LANG="en_US"

However, with en_US set on Ubuntu I run into another issue for which I don't have time to investigate right now, but I don't have any reason not to use en_US. If I run:
# locale

I get these errors:

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Check your version of Ubuntu:
# lsb_realease -a


Stop Syslog from putting "-- MARK --" in the logs (/var/log/messages) every 20 min.
# vim /etc/default/syslogd
SYSLOGD="-m 0"



Related info:
http://iulmit.blogspot.ro/2013/03/remote-access-to-linux-via-ssh-using.html


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Actualizat: 2009-03-17.
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