Correct Putty configuration for Ubuntu 9.04

Question

I often use Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) to connect to Ubuntu boxes (9.04 now). It works well, but I can't figure out the correct combination of Putty font, character encoding, character translation, and terminal configuration on the Ubuntu end so that the terminal displays everything correctly. The problem is most obvious when running an ncurses program such as "screen-profiles" or "w3m". The box drawing characters are messed up.

Has anyone got this combination working to their satisfaction?

Answer 1

The best I've been able to come up with is to change the putty configuration in Window/Translation to UTF-8 and the font in Window/Appearance to Lucida Console.

It gets most of the characters correct. In "aptitude" the menus are correctly outlined in line drawing characters, but not the "Are you sure you wish to exit" pop up dialog. Running a command like "man ls" now shows most of the characters correctly, but hyphenated words end up with a box replacing the hyphen.

It's good enough for programming in Emacs, anyway. Better solutions appreciated.

Answer 2

it helps a lot thanks

Answer 3

I use Putty mainly to interact with my Ubuntu vm-boxen so I do spend some time getting the visual configuration correct. Basically, I set the font to MS Gothic, 9pt (for monospaced and Japanese), UTF-8 for received data, and terminal-type string to xterm-256color. I leave most of the Terminal settings alone because the defaults seem to work well.

On the Ubuntu side, I set LANG=en_US.UTF-8, aptitude install ncurses-term for additional terms. I check the terminal colorness via a nice script, and double check within a GNU Screen session and GNU Emacs (M-x list-colors-display). GNU Screen is not compiled with 256 color option so i re-compile it. I check the language by using Emacs (M-x view-hello-file) and also tig a git directory with i18n utf-8 log commits.

Unfortunately I still do get the weird "lqqqqk" thing on aptitude (line art missing?) but the spacing is still correct. Also pressing backspace in aptitude does a character insert, which I still have not conquered. Also I tested your command line w3m on my system and it looks nice. I rather use w3m from emacs, tho. :-)

Truth be told, I use a Japanese fork of Putty called Gottani (PuTTY ごった煮版) that helps more with Japanese but I think its pretty close to the normal Putty.

Aside: I also set Terminal > Features > Disable remote-controlled terminal resizing because `GNU Screen" overrides my window size setting.

All of the above is tested on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron".