The speakup patch included in recent Red Hat kernels messes up <ALT-GR> key processing. This is a major key on many european keybords. For example on a french keyboard you need it to access <~>, <#>, <{>, <[>, <|>, <`>, <\>, <^>, <@>, <]>, <}>. The bug occurs both on the console and in X. While not systematic (i.e not for each key strike), it *will* occur during any meaningful user activity. It was first reported in NULL, went into 8.0, and was propagated to Red Hat 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 via Red Hat errata. There has been no public Red Hat activity on this bug since august 2002.
Well, I did the stupid thing and opened a specific bug for each affected Red Hat version. I kept the original bug report as the RH 8.0-specific entry.
*** Bug 79066 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 79065 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 79064 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 79063 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A problem report was posted to the speakup mailing list. You can read the thread at this address: http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2002-December/018724.html
seems to have been corrected in kernel-2.4.18-19.8.0 from updates. don't see the problem with that kernel.
I can confirm that, haven't noticed the problem in the most recent errata kernel.
Seems this time its definitely fixed in erratas. I'll close the bug now.