[sclug] Debian: strange console behaviour?

[Will Dickson]

Hi all,

I have a Debian machine which starts certain Java applications at boot 
time. They work OK, but when they print console messages, it behaves as 
though the console had seen a line-feed but no carriage-return - the
first character of the line is immediately to the right of the last 
character of the preceeding line.

All other console messages come out OK. The Java messages come out fine 
in an xterm, and they've come out fine on the console of other distros.

Anybody have any ideas? The word "termcap" is going through my brain 
(although not doing much else).