Since Fedora Core 1 was installed on my linux box at home, I’ve noticed that connecting to it via ssh from Windows or OS X always resulted in strange characters appearing in man pages and certain terminal based applications.
I’ve finally figured out how to stop it…

It’s all down to the fact that FC1 uses a UTF-8 locale by default and PuTTY and OS X’s terminal application don’t seem to support this. Solution? export LANG=en_GB from the .bash_profile and away the problem goes.

This was something I found at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=90661 – a bug about PINE not showing the correct characters. The comment in the middle has the fix:

To do this, run pine with: “LANG=en_US pine” or in your case it might
perhaps be: “LANG=fr_FR pine” instead.

Alternatively, you can disable unicode system wide if you prefer by setting
the system default locale to be non unicode. set LANG=fr_FR in
/etc/sysconfig/i18n and reboot.

Since I’m not in France and not French, I’ll be using en_GB instead of fr_FR 🙂