A more general solution should be use the pccon terminal type (or pccon0 if you have a screen with more than 25 lines) (see /etc/termcap for descriptions). They provide acs (or ascii line drawing for pccon0) and color.
Here in my T410 I have put this in .profile: [ -z $TMUX] && [ -z $DISPLAY ] && TERM=pccon0 export TERM
