Re: Problems with Redhat 8 in console window

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> I used the rpm to load the latest mc onto Redhat 8.  It works fine in a
> Gnome terminal but not in the console, outside of the windows
> environment.  In the latter case, there are no borders and the
> background color does not complete cover all areas of the mc window--in
> particular the mini-status window along the bottom of the screen.
> Also, the two directory windows are butted right up against each
> other--which I guess goes with the fact that there are no borders to
> separate them.

mc doesn't support UTF-8 terminals.  I think it was a bad decision of Red
Hat to add UTF-8 support in the form in which it was done.  Application
are supposed to check the TERM environment variable for terminal settings,
including line drawing characters.  In Red Hat 8.0, applications should
also check the locale and adjust their output if the locale uses UTF-8
encoding.

> Are there settings that I can change to improve the appearance?

Sorry, there are no such settings.  For some reason, using ASCII
characters to draw lines was implemented as an option "-a", not as a
setting that can be saved.

You can load a non-UTF font using setfont and remove "UTF-8" from your
locale - that would be a permanent fix.

> It works fine, by the way, from a telnet terminal--except for the fact
> that, as another user reported a while back, the background color
> doesn't cover over all erased areas--which I handled by changing the
> telnet client's background color to that of mc.  (I use putty)  The
> color in case anyone is interested is :
>     0 0 187 (rgb)

It's a bug in putty.  It disables "bce" (background color erase)
capability by default, but the TERM variable is set to a terminal that
normally has "bce" in its capabilities.  This bug was fixed in the current
putty snapshot:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/bce-default-change.html

With putty releases, just enable "background color erase" in the options.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin