Getting Midnight Commander line drawing to work with PuTTY

When using Midnight Commander with the default settings of PuTTY connected to my Ubuntu Linux machine the line drawing characters are all messed up.

After some experimentation it turns out that to fix it all you have to do is change your character set in PuTTY to UTF-8 and the problem is fixed. To do this open up the PuTTY settings and go to Window->Translation->Received data assumed to be in which character set: and change it to UTF-8.

After making this change you might have to force a redraw of the mc screen to show the new line drawing characters:

Also not that some fonts might not have the line drawing characters available. The fonts I know work is Courier New and Lucida Console. To change your font go to Window->Appearance, Font settings and click the Change button.

For reference, I was using using Midnight Commander 4.6.2 running on Ubuntu 8.04 and using PuTTY 0.60

Using PuTTY ssh keys with OpenSSH on Ubuntu

Anyone who needs to access a unix/linux/osx machine from windows via ssh will be familiar with PuTTY, the free ssh client. PuTTYGen, available to download here, is a handy utility for creating RSA/DSA public/private keys for authentication. If you have generated your RSA keys using PuTTYGen, and would like to use them with OpenSSH on Ubuntu, you just need to follow a few simple steps:

• Install putty with: sudo apt-get install putty
• Create the public key file:
  puttygen /path/to/puttykey.ppk -L > ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• Create the private key file:
  puttygen /path/to/puttykey.ppk -O private-openssh -o ~/.ssh/id_rsa

You should now be able to log into an SSH server using your private key. To install your public key simply copy from ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on your local machine to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote server.