Vim, Python and curses

I wrote a small python script for vim that uses the curses library. When I try to call the function curses complains about:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 9, in &l开发者_C百科t;module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/curses/__init__.py", line 33, in initscr
fd=_sys.__stdout__.fileno())
_curses.error: setupterm: could not find terminal

Don't know how to solve this

Edit: GVIM complains Vim works fine

I'm not very sure about the context, but "GVIM complains Vim works fine" is very insightful: curses are used in the console, gvim is run in a X window, thus there's no console.