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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3)
Gecko/20041020 Galeon/1.3.17

Description of problem:
Emacs has two main modifier keys for generating keyboard shortcuts:
control and meta. On a PC, the most convenient way to use emacs is to
make the "logo" keys (the "Windows" key and possibly the "menu" key)
be meta; the alt key is then available for other purposes, such as
generating accented characters. (Alternatively, alt can be used as
meta. But this is broken as well, and is reported as bug #135505.)

x11's xkb facility provides a mechanism by determining how modifier
keys are mapped. Previously, one could supply the altwin:meta_win
option to xkb, and that would make Emacs recognize the Windows key as
meta. But this no longer works.

So, as the Emacs and xorg-x11 that come with Fedora Core 3 interact,
it is not possible to get any key to work as meta under emacs. One is
forced to use the escape key for that purpose, which is very inconvenient.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
xorg-x11-6.8.1-12

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Issue the command `setxkbmap -option "altwin:meta_win"'
2. Type the 'f' key while holding down the Windows key in Emacs under x11
    

Actual Results:  No effect

Expected Results:  Cursor should have gone forward one word in the
current window.

Additional info:

Using the "describe key" command (C-h k) command in Emacs yields the
following result for this key combination: "H-M-s-f is undefined".
What Emacs should have received is "M-f" (which is bound to the
forward-word command). Thus, because x11 sets the "hyper" and "super"
flags, and not just the "meta" flag as is expected, Emacs doesn't
recognize the key combination in the desired way.

This bug has been reported on the emacs development list:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00016.html

Posts on this thread give reasons why the behavior of x11 was changed
so that this problem is produced; it has something to do with
facilitating the simultaneous use of two keyboard layouts. One post
also mentions that Debian has been struggling with this for some time.

In Fedora Core 2, I was able to get around this problem by modifying
the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/altwin by commenting out the line

  modifier_map Mod4	{ <META>, Meta_L, Meta_R };

in the definition of meta_win. Apparently, what this did is made Emacs
receive "Alt-f" when one pressed 'f' while holding down the Windows
key, and Emacs interpreted the "Alt" as meta. This is consistent with
what is reported in bug #135505.

Thus, it may be that the change from Fedora Core 2 to Core 3 here is
not in xorg-x11 but in Emacs. It appears that the immediate problem is
that a patch to Emacs to treat Alt as meta was removed. But this patch
itself was apparently a workaround to a bug in xorg-x11.

A similar problem is discussed under the heading "After upgrading to a
newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working" in
/usr/share/emacs/21.3/etc/PROBLEMS. Unfortunately, the suggestions
given there are not helpful in the present case.