My new laptop arrived earlier in the week (I’ll do a review at some stage later), and while setting it up I chose a user name with an English spelling, because of issues I had previously on my old laptop.
Originally on my last machine I had a user name with “Mícheál” as the user name (for non Irish speakers the accent over the “i” and “a” is called a fada. Alt Gr + “i” give the “í”, Alt Gr + “a” give the “á”). And while this caused no problems 99% of the time , there were 2 times it caused hassle:
- some apps would install apparently correctly but would have problems with paths
- dialling in remotely would cause problems if I didn’t have a keyboard configured as Irish on the remote side.
I could porbably work around the second point if I could rememeber the French version (the acute I believe, might need to check there are no accents needed for that!) of the letters. But it was the first point that caused the most hassle.
I use the SpringSource Tool Suite as my IDE for Java, which is based on Eclipse. But I eventually figured out that a lot of weird issues were arising from the fact that Eclipse (or in some cases Maven), were having issues in reading file paths with the fadas (ie c:\user\Mícheál). While some locations would show fine, others would render with garbage characters in place of the Irish characters, and in some places the characters were just stripped out completely (eg c:\users\Mchel).
Anyway, I’m sure there are proper work arounds (I just created a c:\sts folder and installed into that), but prevention being better than a cure this time I just created a user with all English characters.