Every time I compile a program from source code that uses the ncurses library, it fails to work in those ways. For example, Midnight Commander will not respond to the different function keys, has no color, and is just unusable. This seems to be the case with everything that I compile from source code that uses this library. I have looked around, and cannot find any solution, or even any hint that this is a known problem. I have had this problem on both Ubuntu and Debian. When I install the programs from the binary packages, however, they work just fine. I would prefer not to use the binary packages from Debian, as they are generally very out of date. I hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Aiden Loyd