E558: Terminal entry not found in terminfo

I am getting this error message while trying to edit a file in OEL 5.5 by using "vi" editior:
E558: Terminal entry not found in terminfo


This note is the best one I googled out of numerous pages to offer solution on how to resolve this kind of problem:
"$TERM was xterm in gnome-terminal, while it was dumb in terminatorfor my user account and unknown in terminator for the root account.

In the end, adding the line export TERM=xterm to ~/.bashrc and /root/.bashrc seems to have fixed the problem…"