Ubuntu 8.04.. annoyances part 2
August 19, 2008
Following up on part 1, the list of stupidities in this distro continues to get longer.
- xterm is configured with the bare upstream defaults
(
*XTerm*metaSendsEscape: false), meaning that all Alt- combinations are essentialy broken because they produce accented characters instead of the key sequences mcedit depends so heavily on (like Alt-? in Midnight Commander to run a search, for example). - The less pager is not configured to use lesspipe by
default, meaning that trying to run `
less /proc/config.gz` gets you gibberish instead of, well, your configuration file. Systems as old as RHEL5 have this feature. - There is no obvious way to start SCIM and have its environment
variables set by a system mechanism before the window manager starts.
In openSUSE, all you
do is set
INPUT_METHOD="scim"in/etc/sysconfig/languageand be done with it. No fiddling with window-manager-specific startup scripts that often get executed from a late subprocess and as such, the important environment variableXMODIFIERSwould not propagate to where it is needed. - It took them incredibly long to do a 64-bit userland right whereas other distros had it for years.
- No distro way to set up bridges (in
/etc/sysconfig/network), you are stuck with the bare brctl commands. Needless to say it's the same crap for IPv6. - UTF-8 by default seems like scarce ware, both console and xterm.