- I dislike Ubuntu, but most of the so-called “Unix” machines are Ubuntu. (The rest are Solaris.)
- I like bash (as most Unix-like users do these days, I bet...), but their default shell is tcsh. Perhaps this is a convention inherited from antediluvian days.
- They have GNOME, Xfce, fvwm, Sawfish and Fluxbox installed. The only major DE/WM missing is KDE, which is my favorite.
The first time I tried to print something, it was sent to a printer in a lab 50 yards away, despite the fact that there was one only 2 yards from me. I needed to set the PRINTER environment variable so that lpr knew I wanted to use the printer in my office.
If I were using KDE, I would have finished this in 20 seconds, by catting a 2-line file to ~/.kde/env. But it took me 20 minutes to find its counterpart in GNOME, and then another 5 minutes to find out whether I should write the script ~/.gnomerc in Bourne Shell grammar or C Shell grammar. The answer is Bourne Shell grammar. Though the default shell is tcsh, ~/.gnomerc is always interpreted by /bin/sh, which is a symlink to dash (not bash) in Ubuntu and latest version of Debian... Humph.....
