Terminal emulation when connecting to solaris boxes

[Sean M McMahon]

In my shell source file on work's solaris box, I set the terminal variable 
to vt100 because that worked relatively well with windows but it still had 
it's problems.  When I tried to connect to that machine using my new 
debian box, I was surprised to discover the same problems, it can't 
backspace in emacs properly in some applications like sftp and doesn't 
understand all the emacs key bindings.  What terminal type is my linux box 
 and how can I make Debian and Solaris talk better? 
Sean