Re: Right-Alt not working? A possible fix

[Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Emanoil Kotsev <deloptes@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Patrick Wiseman wrote:
>
>> Hello:
>>
>> After a recent testing upgrade (I do it daily, but this happened two
>> days ago), my right-Alt key was not working properly.  Eg, in
>> Iceweasel, Alt-left should go to the previous page.  With the right
>> Alt key, nothing happened; with the left Alt key, it behaved as
>> expected.  Googling revealed that, in Ubuntu, the right alt key
>> "chooses 3rd level", but that did not seem to be so here when I
>> checked System/Preferences/Keyboard.  But selecting the option "Right
>> Alt key never chooses 3rd level" under the "Key to choose 3rd level"
>> option appears to have corrected the problem.
>>
>> I never had this problem before; is Debian making some eurocentric
>> presumptions (use of 3rd level on the keyboard) in its defaults?  I
>> have no objection to that, except that when I select a US keyboard I
>> would not expect those presumptions to operate!
>>
>> Patrick
>
> right alt has special meaning on some keyboards and it depends on your
> Xserver, desktop or console.

None of which I changed.

>
> Have you had any updates recently, check! Ubuntu != Debian why are you
> citing this?

I am well aware that Ubuntu is not Debian - I cited it because it was
about the only thing that Googling turned up on the problem.  And, as
it turns out, the solution was related!  Did you notice that?

I posted in the hopes my information might be of help to people who
experienced the same issue that I did, oh, I don't know, to maybe save
them some time tracking it down?  I'm sorry it caused you a snit.

Patrick