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My issue may be related. I was able to use the Right Alt key to create accented characters until about a week or two ago. I know I was able to since I completed a Spanish class assignment using it. There were no problems.

A few days ago, KDE was upgraded on my system, along with other updates, to version 3.5.5. Today, when I tried to use the accents, it did not work. I tried all different sorts of things to no avail. However, when I tried to do this on another Linux system still running KDE 3.5.4, the accents still work! I checked that the KDE Control center configurations are identical, and they are. Note that the accenting works everywhere on the KDE 3.5.4 system, and apparently works nowhere on the KDE 3.5.5 system, at least that I could find.

And, no, I have not made any major alterations to my KDE in the past few days. And I googled for this problem everywhere. I remembered that the change I made to enable compose keys for accents was extremely simple when I finally figured it out, thanks to a tip on the internet. So I knew when I went looking today that it couldn't be that hard to enable it.

My conclusion is that something in the KDE keyboard drivers is amok in 3.5.5. But if someone can point me, I am all ears; I just want to get my homework done! Hopefully, this will be handled soon. Meanwhile, I work on KDE 3.5.4.

I just discovered something interesting. If I export SAL_ALTGR_COMPOSE=1 or SAL_NO_DEADKEYS=1 on the command line before launching oowriter, the ALTGR key works precisely as it is supposed to. I figured this out because it turns out (I was wrong about the problem being everywhere), thunderbird mail could compose characters with the ALTGR key.

Now the only question I have is why this works on a different version of KDE/Linux when these variables do not appear to be set anywhere in the system (I didn't find them set in the /etc/profile.d files). More to follow ...

Also, I am not that familiar with KDE innards. Is there a simple way to set environment on a program-by-program basis for binaries launched from the KDE desktop (as opposed to the command line)? OS/2 had a feature like this ...

Quoted

Originally posted by nziams
After a routine upgrade to latest KDE and Xorg version, my keyboard map (pt) started to act weird.
In Qt/KDE applications, specific portuguese characters are simply ignored, even if i turn the proper KDE layout on.
In OpenOffice, the deadkeys where certain accents are taken from behave more or less like nodeadkeys.
In Firefox, on the other hand, it all works as it shall.

Here is an example.

Intended character: à (a with grave accent; html name entity &agrave
Qt/KDE apps: a (plain a)
OpenOffice: `a (accent apart from a)
Firefox: à (correct rendering)

The keyboard section at /etc/X11/xorg.conf looks like:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "pt"
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin"
EndSection

Nuno.

I have the same problem since i changed the system encoding from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1... i've upgraded to 3.5.6 but i'm having the same problem.
If I change to UTF-8 the deadkeys work well again.

Have anyone already found a solution to this problem?

I think this problem is the same as I had, see my bug report at http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=36408 (I'm using Mandriva) for my findings and a workaround on this problem.