The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron

Here's some tips to unbreak Hardy, in case anyone tunes in...

I had the problem that semirandomly, when I was typing in gnome-terminal, the keyboard went
into some kind of locked mode and half the keypresses didn't do anything and the letters I
could produce were suddenly underlined. The problem turned out to be with a package called
scim, so I recommend uninstalling it. It appears to listen to ctrl+space to trigger, and
ctrl+space just tends to happen to me during normal typing, maybe because I'm a bit
ham-handed.

(Bonus tip: xmodmap hack may be used to eliminate the \xa0 character from alt+space, which
tends to break programming languages which do not treat this
char-that-looks-just-like-space-except-it-isn't very well.)

Each time some random program segfaults, you might get a long period of disk trashing, and
then report about program crash. (Maybe this only applies during the beta versions of Hardy?)
The solution is to uninstall apport, which makes crashes much less painful to experience. I
suspect the crash reporting utility pulls in a lot of Python, and on slower systems such as my
old laptop, it is a nightmare to experience.

On laptop keyboards, F1 is often too close to Esc, and I tend to hit that accidentally, often
several times in row when I try to press esc and wonder why nothing is happening. This results
in immense disk churn and several copies of this stupid help program popping up. For this
problem, I did not find any other way but destroying the /usr/bin/gnome-help binary. (I wrote
a shell script with "exit 0" in its place.)

Also: do yourself a huge favour and remove tracker. This thing churns your disk endlessly and
maddeningly, and appears to slow down pretty much everything. Unless you have top-of-the-line
hardware, it's worth it to kill it.