Hi, i'm breaking my LinuxQuestions cherry here, i'm running debian. One day I upgraded, and now when I run programs such as Midnight Commander and Aptitude, I get borders that are drawn in with TEXT instead of ascii lines.. Please help me, I've been using Linux for 2 years now. I can't figure it out though and it's killing me....

PS: I'm using Bash if that helps... I tried looking for an option in the bash files but to no luck.
hmmm, maybe I changed my codepage by accident ?? I also looked in console-tools and I didn't notice anything ... DOH!..

Thanks in advance!

I think that Midnight Commander and Aptitude use ncurses to draw their screens. I suggest that you take a look at ncurses as the possible cause of the problem.

"One day I upgraded"

Take a look at what happened to ncurses during the upgrade. Perhaps you have a version of ncurses which is incompatible with your versions of MC and Aptitude. Maybe you have a buggy ncurses. Maybe you can solve the problem simply by reinstalling ncurses.

I am running out of maybes.

For what it's worth, I had the same problem on my Redhat servers. The ones I upgraded to Redhat 9 had midnight commander running in "ugly" mode. Apparantly the mc version running there whas a newer 4.6, and my on my older box there was a 4.5.5 version.
I copied the old mc to my new server, and trying to launch it, it complained it was missing the slang library. I looked that up (slang.so.1) and copied it over, because no other file was called that way on my new system (UTF-8 flavours in abondance though). I tried it again, an it worked nicely. Some more problems with the menu files on different locations - copied them over as well.

I'm only a "chipoteur" in Linux (our word here for a newbie), but since this solved my problem, I guess it is worth while reporting it. Some more information (notice the differences?):

GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.0
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish, undelfs
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With support for X11 events
With internationalization support

GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.55
Edition: text mode
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, ftpfs, mcfs, undelfs
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with termcap database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
Using locale "en_US.UTF-8" (from environment variable LANG)