Debian – What’s the difference between mtpfs and jmtpfs packages in Debian

Summary

1. If you are using Ubuntu, it probably changed around 2005, when the default character set changed from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8.
2. US Alternative International adds some dead keys.

The dead key settings depend on your locale and character set.

For example:

• en_US.UTF-8 is defined in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
• ISO 8859-1 is defined in /usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose

If you look in them using grep, you can see there is a difference:

$ grep '<dead_acute> <c>' /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose 
<dead_acute> <c>                    : "ć"   U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE

$ grep '<dead_acute> <c>' /usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose
<dead_acute> <c>            : "\347"    ccedilla

Namely:

• Latin1 encoding: ', c = ç
• UTF-8 encoding: ', c = ć

The git logs ((en_US.UTF-8) (iso8859-1)) show it has been this way since at least 2004.

The difference between US International and US Alternative International is defined in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

Namely, the US Alternative International layout adds these extra AltGr dead keys:

• dead_macron: on AltGr-minus
• dead_breve: on AltGr-parenleft
• dead_abovedot: on AltGr-period
• dead_abovering: on AltGr-0
• dead_doubleacute: on AltGr-equal (as quotedbl is already used)
• dead_caron: on AltGr-less (AltGr-shift-comma)
• dead_cedilla: on AltGr-comma
• dead_ogonek: on AltGr-semicolon
• dead_belowdot: on AltGr-underscore (AltGr-shift-minus)
• dead_hook: on AltGr-question
• dead_horn: on AltGr-plus (AltGr-shift-equal)
• dead_diaeresis: on AltGr-colon (Alt-shift-semicolon)

For example:

• US International: AltGr+- = ¥
• US Alternative International: AltGr+-, a = ā

UTF-8 became the default encoding:

• Red Hat 8.0 "Psyche", released September 30, 2002 reference
• Ubuntu 5.04 "hoary", released April 8, 2005 reference
• Debian 4.0 "etch", released as "stable" April 8, 2007 reference 1 reference 2

Run smartctl -a /dev/sda or whatever your disk is. Then look at the read error rate and seek error rate lines. If one of theses value is high your disk is probably dead.