So, it seems that the easy debian terminal DOES show everything the way it should be, which makes, while the n900 xterm definitely doesn't. Running crawl.akrasiac.org on one produces different results from running it on the other.

Due to keyboard problems in easy debian, it would be nice if I got this all working outside it. It definitely can't be a hardware problem. Have I missed some kind of easy solution here? Anyway, I just don't understand what the problem is here.