Fixing Putty Rendering Issues

Configuring Locales and Character Encoding on Linode Debian system

For quite a while I had broken rendering in putty when accessing our Linux servers. Searching the net resulted in solutions most stating to use UTF-8 encoding setting in Putty. This however was only partially successful as line rendering was still broken.

I believe the reason for this is that the Linode Debian installation skips the `locales` configuration bit; to run the setup manually execute the below command:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Find your locale and choose the 'UTF-8' version of it, for my systems I selected, 'en_CA ISO-8859-1', 'en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8', 'en_US ISO-8859-1', and 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8', with 'en_US.UTF-8' being default. Finally confirm your Putty is using the 'UTF-8' encoding setting in 'Windows > Translation'

Running 'dpkg-reconfigure lecales' again shows that rendering is now correct.