Sounds like your xterm is not behaving correctly.  Be careful
here, are you saying 'xterm' in the generic meaning, or are
you using the real /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm program? I am pretty
sure what you mean here that you are using either KTerm or
Konsole, which is what is launched when you click on the
KDE terminal button - the X Terminal.  X Terminal and xterm
are not the same thing.

My experience with KTerm has been that it is a very buggy
program.

The lines ending in 31m or 20m or whatever mean that the line
endings have not been properly processed.  Usually this is a
representation of ^M or control-M which is the carriage return
symbol.  MOST linux files do not have lines ending with a ^M.
This is an MSDOS thing.  MSDOS ends lines in CR LF, or ^M^L,
whereas Unix lines end in LF only.  When a Unix terminal
looks at an MSDOS file it will see this ^M and sometimes not
process it correctly and display it as a funny control 
character.  However, in these X Terminals, I have even seen
Unix files with improper line endings, specially in the output
of the ls command.

I think what you need to do here is twofold.  

One, do not use KTerm.  I think Konsole is okay, but xterm is
the better one.  You can assign the new program to the KDE
button.  that is what I do.

The second thing is that you can redefine your terminal
emulation in the /etc/profile.  I usually have these lines
in there:

TERM=vt100
export TERM

However, that said, I think that you can also define an XTERM
environment variable, but I am not sure about that.  In any
case, if you define the TERM variable correctly, some of these
problems may go away.  Your choices are vt100, vt220 etc.
There are also possibilities for PC compatible consoles.  You
can experiment with these.  For the most part, anything you
pick will become effective at the next login.  So log out and
log back in and you get the new TERM.  Not much you can
screw up here, but you may prefer to play with it in 
~/.bash_profile rather than in /etc/profile.  That way if
something locks you out of a login as 'sher' you can log in
as root and edit it.

Look in /etc/termcap for a listing of your possible TERM
settings.  I would start with vt100.   vt100 and vt52 are
also understood to Windows 95/98 telnet sessions, although
Windows does not handle them too well and most people think
of Unix/Linux to be kludgy when in fact it is the terminal
emulation in the Windows telnet that is screwed up.

I should mention that the REAL vt100 terminal has a keyboard
unlike the PC, which means that the emulation is not without
holes, and some keys map over in strange ways.  You may be
better off setting TERM=pcsomething.

If you experiment like this, please report back to the Mandrake
list what you found out.  In particular after you test it
not only within Mandrake but also from a telnet session from
a Windows 95/98 machine.

-- 
Ramon Gandia ============= Sysadmin ============== Nook Net
http://www.nook.net                            [EMAIL PROTECTED]
285 West First Avenue                     tel. 907-443-7575
P.O. Box 970                              fax. 907-443-2487
Nome, Alaska 99762-0970 ==== Alaska Toll Free. 888-443-7525

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