I always forget the settings that get solid results connecting to my CentOS/Fedora systems under Putty. Here’s the whole nine yards, maybe someone else will be able to use ‘em as well.
Get putty from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html. I use the installer.
Get puttycyg from http://web.gccaz.edu/~medgar/puttycyg/. Unpack the .exe files over your putty folder. This will be c:\program files (x86)\Putty if you use the installer on x64 windows. You’ll want to replace the originals.
Drag pageant.exe into your startup folder.
Download bitstream vera from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/
Unpack the zipfile somewhere. Select all the .ttf files, right click, select install.
Start putty (you did make a quicklaunch icon, right?)
* Under keyboard, select ‘Linux’ under ‘The function keys and keypad’
* Under window, set lines of scrollback to something nice, like 10000
* Under appearance, change the font to BitSteam Sans Vera Mono, any size you like. I use 9.
* Under behavior, check ‘full screen on alt-enter’
* Under translaction set character set to UTF-8
* Under colors, adjust ANSI Blue to something like 100,100,255 (it’s too dark to read by default
* Under connection, set seconds between keepalives to 600
* Under connection-data, set terminal-type string to ‘linux’
* Under SSH-Auth, check ‘Allow Agent Forwarding’
Finally… go back to session, click ‘Default Settings’, and ‘Save’.