nano error: Error opening terminal: xterm-256color

Question

After the installation of OSX Lion, I tried to:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

But I get this error:

Error opening terminal: xt         


        

Answer 1

I hear that this can be fixed by overwriting your /usr/share/terminfo with one from the computer of somebody with a working install of Lion. I can't confirm whether this works or not, and unfortunately I haven't upgraded yet, so I can't provide you with that file.

Answer 2

You can add the following in your .bashrc

if [ "$TERM" = xterm ]; then TERM=xterm-256color; fi

Answer 3

After upgrading to OSX Lion, I started getting this error on certain (Debian/Ubuntu) servers. The fix is simply to install the “ncurses-term” package which provides the file /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-256color.

This worked for me on a Ubuntu server, via Erik Osterman.

Answer 4

I, too, have this problem on an older Mac that I upgraded to Lion.

Before reading the terminfo tip, I was able to get vi and less working by doing "export TERM=xterm".

After reading the tip, I grabbed /usr/share/terminfo from a newer Mac that has fresh install of Lion and does not exhibit this problem.

Now, even though echo $TERM still yields xterm-256color, vi and less now work fine.

Answer 5

On Red Hat this worked for me:

export TERM=xterm

further info here: http://www.cloudfarm.it/fix-error-opening-terminal-xterm-256color-unknown-terminal-type/

Answer 6

I can confirm this is a terminfo issue. This is what worked for me. SSH in to the remote machine and run

 sudo apt-get install ncurses-term

Boom. Problem solved.