Midnight Commander Trashed?
 

Just tried mc today. It was working perfectly until the July 12 updates. Now the mc border/window fonts are fouled up. Tried reinstalling mc, but it is still the same. Any ideas how to get it working again. I rely heavily on it.

My mc is still behaving properly on --Current, also updated through the 12th.

Try deleting or renaming (probably a better option) ~/.local/share/mc and restarting mc.

I have no idea whether this will work, but it's likely the best starting point.

You might also have a look in /usr/share/mc. Perhaps you will find something there bearing on the configuration.

Thanks. I'll give it a try. Re-installing mc didn't fix it, but maybe this will.

Clear out ~/.config/mc too.

I've seen this before, it had something to do with consoletrans and consolefont terminus that I used.
Can't remember how I fixed it exactly, but I do remember the display working perfectly with iso8859-1 and not so good with UTF.

I think UTF is the cause. If the OP is tracking -current, the Jul 12th update makes UTF-8 the default locale:

So I think they'll need to revert those changes.

I tried clearing out ~/.config/mc and deleting ~/.local/share/mc and restarting mc.

The borders around the top, bottom, and sides of the mc display are wrong.

I'm still looking for a cure.

I just tried running mc -a, and it works correctly, but mc without any options reverts to wrong borders.

This is in the Linux console and not in X, right?

Is pkgtools messed up too?

I think pkgtools must be OK, since I did a remove and install of mc just recently. The odd mc "frame" characters are OK if I run mc -a in either console or X windows (blackbox).
I found a slackware locale document saying to run stty -a to see if utf8 is identified. It showed -iutf8, meaning it was not operational. Lilo config says to append utf8. I reran lilo, still have mc display messed up.
I kind of remember having the same problem a few years ago after continually updating slackware like a running release.
I think I did a fresh installation to cure it. I may need to do this again.

I did more tests using my laptop where midnight commander still worked as it should. My laptop only needed the very last kernel, etc, and lilo upgrades to be totally current. Installing these upgrades now fouls up mc and mcedit, just as with my desktop. The fonts being used have changes somewhere, but i haven't a clue where to look anymore. My mcedit scripts for maintaining slackware are almost useless because of the odd characters being displayed at times. Could the fact that my actual location and time zone setting is Japan, but I'm using US English?

try
$ LANG=en_US mc

if that fixes it you can change the LANG setting in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh to en_US

briselec:

Thanks. That fixed the midnight commander font problem. I flat do not understand how en_US.UTF-8 would not work just because my time zone was set for Japan. Hope no other programs are affected. Thanks again.

Which terminal program are you using?
I have noticed problems with the 'tree' and 'man' commands when run in 'rxvt' since the update to UTF-8 as default. This is fixed by running in 'xterm' or updating to 'urxvt' (rxvt-unicode) from SBo.

I have always used bog standard xterm and rxvt. I haven't noticed any other font problems.