Visudo editing messed up

[azenz]

I have never had this problem ever before, but with Hardy when I run visudo and edit /etc/sudoers entires the editing gets messed up, e.g. when I press an arrow key I get a letter appear, and editing text doesn't work properly. Extremely weird. Is this some strange change? Worked fine with Gutsy.

[flying_icarus]

Re: Visudo editing messed up

Possibly the terminal settings inside konsole or whatever terminal program you are using are not right (i seem to have vim not working properly with konsole in KDE4) - just try visudo from a different terminal program and see if that fixes it (xfce4-terminal is a good choice - it can be configured to work exactly like konsole but is not so buggy).

[azenz]

Re: Visudo editing messed up

Hm, that's an idea. Do I get different terminal programs via apt-get, or are they already somewhere?

[flying_icarus]

Re: Visudo editing messed up

Yes, you can for instance do

sudo apt-get install xfce4-terminal

or look for it in the package manager.
Other candidates (uglier but faster) are xterm (you should allready have it installed, just press Alt+F2 and type xterm), or aterm, which is less ugly and even has support for backgrounds and transparencies.

If visudo is screwed up even in an xterm or newly installed xfce4-terminal, try typing

export TERM=xterm

in any terminal that you have started up, and then run visudo
Other combinations you can try are

export TERM=linux

and

export TERM=vt100

terminal type should usually be xterm or xterm-color for terminal windows started in graphical mode... but there are ways this can be fudged up.
If none of the above helps, then you've got a bigger problem on your hands, screwed up termcap entries (descriptions of what xterm, linux, vt100 etc are), and report back so maybe we can fix it as well.

glhf