Thought I'd post my experience with the TERM variable for those i see posting bug reports regarding problems using TERM=linux

I have applications that use the screen indexing and draw upon termcap or terminfo to produce the rioght cursor command codes for different screens.

Sometimes when a new distribution comes out the cursor driven program loses control of the screen. Orginally the cursor control worked with TERM=xterm under RedHat and after experimenting with many possible TERM assignments I found that TERM=linux worked.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 using export TERM=linux went haywire. The terminfo directories did not have an entry for linux but did have linux-basic and so far export TERM=linux-basic seems to work for me.

Sounds like something's broken in your upgrade, since "linux" is the standard entry, part of the ncurses-base package. The "linux-basic" entry is part of ncurses-term (an add-on). The "linux" and "xterm" descriptions have never been interchangeable, for that matter.