Putty: disable configuration of server terminal length

In order for non-ASCII characters to work, all the programs involved must use the same character encoding. The encoding needs to be set:

• 1) in Putty (you have done that)
• 2) on the remote system (usually by setting the LANG env variable to a suitable locale)

Then using non-ASCII on the console should work.

The settings for vim are (mostly) independent of this. vim has its own internal setting for the encoding of the files it edits, and will automatically re-encode text to be suitable for the system settings (i.e. the locale set using LANG).

To address your problem:

You have apparently taken care of 1) & 2), by setting the same encoding in Putty and using LANG. Now editing a file with non-ASCII characters should work in vim, provided vim knows which encoding the file has (either by autodetection, or by doing a :set fileencoding=UTF-8 etc. in vim).

As to "getting a ding when typing non-ASCII characters": You might need to put set input-meta on into your ~/.inputrc (this tells the readline library and thus bash that you want to type non-ASCII stuff) - but most modern Linux distros should no longer need this.

Try to see whether other programs like vim accept non-ASCII stuff - that should tell us where the problem is.

A final remark:

While setting the locale to use ISO 8859-1 certainly works, it is usually better in the long term to use UTF-8. UTF-8 works for just about any language, not just western languages, and is quickly becoming the standard on modern Linux distros.

Note that you can still work with ISO-encoded files in vim, as vim can transcode automatically (it will often even auto-detect that the file is not in UTF-8).

The sun-java6-jre package contains preinst script that prompts for license agreement via /usr/share/debconf/confmodule (also known as "shell script" interface to debconf frontend). The debconf implementation is very hard to follow but I'd guess that the implementation of db_input() checks the TERM environment variable and tries to implement different license agreement prompts for different terminals. See the debconf tutorial at http://www.fifi.org/doc/debconf-doc/tutorial.html. The idea is that debconf frontend may end up using braille display if the end user is vision impaired and the preinst script will just work.

You're not supposed to pass scripted output to interactive debconf frontend as far as I can see it. It's meant for human consumption and may change at any time (according to environment variables, the moon phase and so on). You might want to google for debconf frontend noninteractive.