Place Of Interest
Day 3 on Windows XP. I note the Mozilla does not display the ⌘ (a.k.a. Place Of Interest) sign on Planet Intertwingly. I had put that in as a placeholder for all feeds that do not supply an icon. I try Opera. It doesn’t show up there either. I try Safari. Also not there.
On Mozilla, I see a question mark. Opera and Safari show a rectangle.
The problem turns out that Windows XP does come with a proper Unicode font. Jacques Distler has some recommendations.
Even with the font installed, I still see a rectangle in putty -cygterm, even though I have utf-8 turned on, and have :set encoding=utf-8 in my .vimrc. Copying and pasting that rectangle to an HTML textarea shows the corect symbol, however.
I’ve noticed other oddities in Cygwin, like:
Command completion for
scpandrsyncacross machines doesn’t work. I’ve had that since Dapper. When you are setting up a machine by copying files across a network, you tend to notice things like this. You notice it a lot.if you create a symbolic link of
Desktopto/cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/Administrator/Desktop/, and then cd to~/Desktopandmva file to “..”, the file doesn’t go to your Cygwin home directory, instead it goes to your Windows home directory.if you do a gem install of
libxml-ruby, it will first tell you that you don’t havelibminstalled. What that really means is that you don’t havegccinstalled. Get past that, and you get a message that you don’t havelibiconvinstalled, which means that you don’t havelibiconvinstalled. An iteration or two more, and you have a clean build. You can verify this by issuing:$ ls -l /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-*/lib/xml/libxml_so.so -rwxr-xr-x 1 rubys None 103424 Feb 14 14:06 /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-0.5.2.0/lib/xml/libxml_so.so
Then go into
irband tryrequire 'xml/libxml'. The response:LoadError: No such file or directory - /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-0.5.2.0/lib/xml/libxml_so.so
Purchase order 5003020074 has been placed for a hard drive for Ubuntu. While it will certainly do in a pinch, Cygwin is rapidly ceasing to be a place of interest to me. I long for the real thing.
Correction: I don’t see it when using Konqueror. In Firefox it does work. Time to file a report...
Posted by Giacomo at
I wonder what’s different between our setups.
All it takes is installing a program which includes the necessary font. MS Word appears to be one such program.
Posted by Sam Ruby atI believe PuTTY only displays characters from its configured font. Deja Vu Sans Mono includes quite a lot of Unicode symbols, and may be a good choice.
Posted by Carey at
The symbolic link behaviour cygwin does not seem out of the ordinary. On Linux:
james@nibbler:~/tmp$ mkdir foo foo/bar james@nibbler:~/tmp$ ln -s foo/bar bar james@nibbler:~/tmp$ cd bar james@nibbler:~/tmp/bar$ touch somefile james@nibbler:~/tmp/bar$ mv somefile .. james@nibbler:~/tmp/bar$ cd .. james@nibbler:~/tmp$ ls somefile ls: somefile: No such file or directory james@nibbler:~/tmp$ ls foo bar somefile
While the mv command knows what its current working directory is it doesn’t know how you got there, so it can’t do the same magic as “cd”. You might have some luck with a junction point (similar to a bind mount on Linux), but I don’t what cygwin thinks of them.
Posted by James Henstridge atFor the ssh completion across machines, install bash-completion. It’s installed by default on Debian/Ubuntu, but it’s a manual install for cygwin. It’s still Not Quite Right, but it should work sometimes.
Posted by Matt Reynolds at
The symbolic link behaviour cygwin does not seem out of the ordinary
Good point. I guess a more accurate statement is that symbolic links are too much of a leaky abstraction to completely mask the differences in filesystem layout differences.
install bash-completion
Thanks! That did it.
Posted by Sam Ruby at
I don’t believe I did anything special on my XP installation, and I see the Place Of Interest icon just fine. I wonder what’s different between our setups.
Posted by Scott Johnson at