Since 1992 I've been running BSD as my main operating system. From time to time I use Linux
as well, and they're pretty close. There's almost no difference in the user interface. Some
things are different, though, and they're all the more irritating because they're “not
quite right”. On this page I'm collecting information about things that I find
“wront”, and what to do about them.
This page used to be called my “Hate Linux” page. That was never intended
seriously, but the title might put people off reading it. At present, this page relates to
problems installing Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu.
Some of them will not apply to other distributions.
Overwide man pages
As wide as the screen. Fix with:
export MANWIDTH=80
Disappearing man pages
When you exit
man, the display reverts to what it was before you started. All the
docco is gone. Some BSDs do this too. It's something to do with the
termcap entry, but
I've forgotten how to fix it.
Reverse video xterms
By default,
xterms are white on black. This is such an entrenched default that it's
really painful to try to do anything else.
Colour ls
ls output is in colour! And what colours! I haven't seen any window where they're not
painful, and on a normal
xterm (black on white) some of the entries are invisible
(white on white). At least this one can be fixed, but it's a pain to have to do so every
time: patch
/etc/DIR_COLORS like this:
--- DIR_COLORS 2005/05/25 09:49:52 1.1
+++ DIR_COLORS 2005/07/16 06:32:58
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
# COLOR needs one of these arguments: 'tty' colorizes output to ttys, but not
# pipes. 'all' adds color characters to all output. 'none' shuts colorization
# off.
-COLOR tty
+COLOR none
# Extra command line options for ls go here.
# Basically these ones are:
Asking for confirmation
Programs like
rm and friends ask for confirmation. That's not the UNIX way, and it's
irritating.
Incorrect man page versions
Fixing the “asking for confirmation” problem isn't made any easier by the fact
that the man page documents the correct behaviour, and there's no indication how to turn this
“feature” on or off.
GNOME pain
For some reason,
GNOME has chosen to break established X convention of
Emacs-style editing, substituting something Microsoft-like instead. To their credit,
they've left a way to fix the problem: add the following line to the file
~/.gtkrc-2.0
(creating it if it doesn't exist):
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
