How to fix PuTTY showing garbled characters?
Solution 1:
You almost certainly have set the wrong character set in your PuTTY settings.
Verify the character set on the remote system by running the command:
locale
This should return something like:
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
So check your PuTTY settings under Translation and ensure that you have UTF-8 set as the character set.
You may need to tweak the line drawing setting as well, but it is probably not likely.
Solution 2:
I had an issue with Debian's aptitude program even though I had UTF-8 as my characters set. What worked for me was to set the 'Connection > Data > 'Terminal-type string' to 'putty' instead of 'xterm' - apparently Putty ignores the character sequence to switch into drawing mode: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/utf8-plus-vt100.html
Solution 3:
Also, if UTF-8 is not properly configured, you may run it as mc -ac.
Credits: http://blog.acsystem.sk/linux/midnight-commander-utf8-line-drawing-characters-problem
Solution 4:
After 15 years I got annoyed once more and googled around again, found this, chose
change settings → window → translation → remote char set → "use font encoding"
and that fixed it.
Solution 5:
The two basic factors are Window/Translation UTF-8 in putty and locale settings in Linux, as instructed here and many other places.
In addition, it may help in putty to set Connection/Data/Terminal-type string to putty, and/or in Linux to export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1. These two are also mentioned multiple places.
But: you may still get blocks for certain characters because the default fonts like Courier and Lucida Console don't have all Unicode chars. Download and install http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Download, and set putty to use it.
This last trick was necessary for me to get noping (recommended!) to show all graphic characters.