I should not have seen 'textmode utilities' as a menu option when running GNOME as non-root, but I did, so had to try it out. The display is wrong. This may be X, GNOME, or textutils itself: I am not competent to judge. jpg attached (I hope). Look at the borders, with YYY UUU RRR all around the edges.
Created attachment 1209 [details] jpg showing weird display of textmode tools in GNOME
This has nothing to do with textutils (that package contains cat, cksum, sort and stuff). The screenshot shows the setup program from the setuptool package; since it uses normal newt library calls to generate its interface, it seems to be a problem with newt or gnome-terminal.
hp - can you see if this is gnome-terminal related?
Yeah, I'm stupid. I do know what textutils is when I'm awake. Additional info and suggestion: I changed various themes and fonts to try and shrink the size of things on my 640x480 display. Suggestion is that the font I picked can't display fancy characters and is producing the garbage instead. Font name was 'clean', I believe: shows up as [hobbit@trouble hobbit]$ grep -i font .gnome/* .gnome/Terminal:font=-schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-c-*-iso646.1991-irv .gnome/gnome-terminal-AwCDcN:font=-schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-c-*-iso646.1991-irv .gnome/gnome-terminal-ak7PLR:font=-schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-c-*-iso646.1991-irv .gnome/theme-switcher-capplet:use_theme_font=true .gnome/theme-switcher-capplet:font=-schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-c-*-iso646.1991-irv Any help?
I think newt just uses those funny characters if the font lacks the border characters. Not much else it could do, maybe there are more attractive fallback characters it could use.