[This still is not i386 specific]

Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com> typed:
: Thus spake Johan Danielsson ("JD> ") sometime Today...
: 
: JD> Representing a diminishing minority, I have to say that I still want
: JD> the <- key to generate a DEL, and no key (except CTRL-H) to generate
: JD> ^H. I could not care less what the key marked "delete" produces. Yes
: JD> this means fighting a never ending battle against gtk/gnome/everything
: JD> else.

For X terminal emulators: rxvt should do this by default; xterm has a
resource "backarrowKey" to set this.
 
: This seems to me to be a lot of work for very little gain; why not
: 	stty erase '^H'
: and be done with it?  BS == \010 == \x8 == 8 == (ctrl+H) == "Backspace" ==
: [<-].

You (and many others) are confused about the purpose of stty.  These days
the only stty settings that are generally relevant to most end-users are
the terminal width and height.  stty control characters are relevant in
canonical mode processing, not raw mode.  Guess which mode shells, editors,
etc. put the tty driver.  Here's a big hint: canonical mode provides "lines"
to the reading process not single characters (note: by single characters I
mean one or more characters and not necessarily line delimited. This is the
usual setting with though may be set differently).

Regards,
-- 
Geoff Wing : <gcw@pobox.com>
Rxvt Stuff : <gcw@rxvt.org>
Zsh Stuff  : <gcw@zsh.org>