I changed the LANG setting of my laptop to en_US.UTF-8 so I can use mosh for remote access. That caused some problems with various apps (as I expected). Next, I changed the lilo.conf file to include append="vt.default_utf8=1". Now the apps work better than before, but instead of the bar characters in ncurses interfaces, I just see question marks "?". This is only an issue with the console, xterm seems to be working fine. Does anyone know what I need to do to fix this?

This can happen depending on you choice of a console font.

I'd suggest using one of the Terminus console fonts, as they include an Unicode mapping table. Use one whose name begins with 1, that covers legacy codepages ISO8859-1, ISO8859-15 and Windows-1252, You can list them with "ls /usr/share/kbd/consolefont/ter-1*". For instance to try the size 20 bold (b stands for bold):When you are satisfied, just put the command in /etc/rc.d/rc.font and make that script executable to set it at boot time.

If you need another Unicode mapping or codepage, see the file /usr/doc/terminus-font-4.38/README.

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Thanks. It didn't even occur to me that changing fonts would help.