No line-drawing characters on kubectl exec session to Ubuntu

Windows, and WSL (Ubuntu) work great:

When I connect to a container running on Kubernetes, on Linux (via kubectl exec -it MYPOD -n MYNAMESPACE -c MYCONTAINER -- /bin/bash), all looks grey at first:

Then I discovered it’s because TERM defaults to xterm. When export TERM=xterm-256color, I get this:

Compared to the first image, there’s definitely no line-drawing characters… but also maybe the bright white colour isn’t there either?

I’m using Windows Terminal, which apparently aims for xterm-256color support… and well, it works with WSL/Ubuntu with TERM=xterm-256color. I also tried just Windows PowerShell, which looks the same.

I also tried export LANG=en_US.UTF-8, or export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1, both with no effect.

I’ve tried using other apps / writing general .NET code… k9s can render lines ok. Colour and emojis work fine with other apps.

I’m not sure if this is a gui.cs issue, but since other apps can render stuff ok, I thought I’d check in here. Maybe someone knows something else I could try? Thanks!

(Couldn’t be anything to do with https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs/commit/356b0f8618ea5b644c322c59808d7142d913c369 could it?)

[kierenj]

• IntPtr for setlocale had no effect
• Swapping 0 and 6 for LC_ALL had no effect

Edit: discovered that the default .NET Core docker images use Debian 10, not Ubuntu. I created another VM with Debian 10, which worked. So we have:

Working: Windows, Ubuntu on WSL, Ubuntu VM, Debian 10 VM Not working: dotnet/aspnet:5.0 Docker image on Kubernetes (based on Debian 10 slim) via kubectl exec or ssh

Will try an Ubuntu-based Docker image on Kubernetes later today.

[thunder7553]

One of the information I saw was here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28405902/how-to-set-the-locale-inside-a-debian-ubuntu-docker-container.

The best workaround I used was:

	apt-get install -y locales && \
	sed -i -e 's/# en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8/' /etc/locale.gen && \
    dpkg-reconfigure --frontend=noninteractive locales && \
    update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ENV LANG=en_US.UTF-8 \
	TERM=xterm-256color

Thanks, that’s just what I needed (debian:bullseye-slim based image with .net 7)