Append a guarded snippet to /root/.bash_profile that forces TERM=linux on physical LXC consoles (e.g. noVNC) for login shells. This prevents readline (8.2+) from querying CPR (ESC[6n) which can produce stray R;80R garbage; the change runs only for non-SSH sessions and detects /dev/console or /dev/ttyN. The block is only added if a __cs_console_term marker is not already present.
Create a systemd override for console-getty.service inside LXC containers to set Environment=TERM=linux (written to /etc/systemd/system/console-getty.service.d/pve-console-term.conf) instead of touching getty@tty1/serial-getty unit dirs. This targets the noVNC/LXC console behavior where console-getty.service, not getty@tty1, is used and prevents agetty cursor-position queries from corrupting the noVNC login prompt. Also remove the older workaround in create_lxc_container that forced 'cmode: console' in the LXC config, since the new override addresses the issue.
Reset shell command hash in spinner and make sleep resilient to shells without redirected sleep, preventing stale PATH lookups and failures in background subshells. Improve Gentoo bootstrap by syncing portage (emerge-webrsync or emerge --sync), preferring binary packages (--getbinpkg --usepkg) before falling back to source emerge, and add a fallback fetcher: prefer curl but use wget if curl is unavailable; fail with a clear error if neither is present. Replace direct curl sourcing with a configurable _fetch command to support the wget fallback.
Add a forced container env (_ct_env) exporting LC_ALL/LANG=C.UTF-8 and DEBIAN_FRONTEND to ensure commands (apt, sed, locale-gen, getent, tz setup) run reliably in fresh templates that lack generated locales. Use the env when running pct exec for locale setup, timezone symlink, DNS checks, and apt installs.
Improve terminal handling: set TERM=xterm-256color only for SSH sessions by appending a guarded block to /root/.bashrc, disable /etc/profile.d/vte.{sh,csh} by renaming them to avoid CSI 6n prompt garbage on LXC/noVNC consoles, and add /etc/profile.d/00-lxc-term-size.sh to force a sane stty rows/cols when the pseudo-tty reports 0x0. These changes prevent locale-related errors and stray CSI responses in LXC containers.