Rick Engebretson wrote:
I used to monitor Thomas Dickey's fine ncurses mailing list.
Me too. :-)
He is constantly changing ncurses. (just guessing here ) If slackware got a bad version snapshot you might need to download and install a new version of ncurses. Sometimes that is easier said than done. With SuSE, the RPM database almost forces the installation of the bundled base packages such as ncurses.
You can always install a second copy in /usr/local (or your home directory or wherever) and use appropriate options for linking your programs with those. Relinking all system programs is more difficult (and probably not necessary).
Another ncurses issue is your terminfo database. Check out "infocmp" and related terminfo tools. Some distros set up broken terminfo's that need to be modified or rebuilt ( see "tic").
Generally that's a common caveat, but not in this case. I tried both versions with the same terminfo database, and saw the difference.
Frank