make menuconfig menus are black and wide due to check-lxdialog.sh being not smart enough. Theory: Wide ncurses can be built with --enable-ext-colors. That option enables 256 color support. Such ncurses have different definitions in some headers. The important thing is that wide headers are incompatible with narrow headers. Using narrow headers with wide library means no colors! Just black and white ncurses. Unfortunately check-lxdialog.sh is first trying to use wide ncurses but it doesn't verify that it has wide headers. On my Linux this means that wide library is used with narrow headers -> no colors in ncurses app (like make menuconfig) Solution: 1) don't use wide ncurses at all 2) verify that we have wide headers when using wide ncurses, otherwise use narrow ncurses and narrow headers