ubuntu's gnome-terminal plays really bad with X11 forwarding

[Sergio Callegari]

Hi. Consider the following setup. A ubuntu quantal machine with unity and a kubuntu quantal laptop.

I want to admin the machine remotely from the laptop. I ssh into it with X11 forwarding. Now, I realize that an extra terminal would be nice, so I start gnome-terminal on the machine. Due to the ssh X11 forwarding, the terminal should appear on the laptop.

As a matter of fact it does. But the way in which it does so is quirky and wrong.

1. The terminal initially appears at the proper window size. But immediately the window starts shrinking autonomously, until it is about 1 row high and 25 chars wide.

2. At this point, grabbing the window corner I can re-make it the proper size (e.g. 80 chars by 25 rows). Once this is done, the window appears to stay the proper size.

3. However, resizing the window is a strange matter. At some window sizes, you get a half line at the bottom of the screen. At some others a repeated line. At some others an empty white stripe. It takes care to adjust the size so that the terminal works fine.

4. If at this point you maximize the window it does so fine. However, unmaximizing it then brings you back to the problem from point 1. Rather than taking its previous unmaximized size, the window does so for a second. Then starts shrinking by itself until it is 1 row high and a few chars wide.

Other terminals (e.g. xterm) work just fine. What is happening?

Please fix gnome-terminal so that it does not break X11 standards such as X11 forwarding.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gnome-terminal 3.6.0-0ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 3.7.4-030704-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu9
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Jan 26 11:12:58 2013
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-21 (97 days ago)