My first patch (easy) detects this situation and reports error: http://marc.info/?l=util-linux-ng&m=146472764815386&w=2 I will write a second patch that will detect ncurses5 properly. Hopefully, both ncurses libraries are part of a single libncurses5 package, so there are no new dependencies. Relinking whole util-linux against libncursesw instead of libncurses should cause no regression as well: It was so in SLE 11, and it is in Factory again. In fact, util-linux with libncurses is not well tested combination.