• When I installed FC4 on my main workstation, I did not have the problem.

• GNOME Terminal does not have the problem, xterm does.

RAWK! SethK is Da Man! He figured it out. This fixed my problem. Put this into ~/.Xdefaults (or however you want to set your Xterm defaults):

XTerm*VT100.Translations:       #override     Meta  period: string(0x1B) string(0x2E) \n

Then, if you don't want to restart X, do this:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

SethK says this is probably more-generally solved by doing this:

XTerm.metaSendsEscape:          true

Although that might not work. He couldn't get it to work with a short couple tries:

(12:42:31) sethk_: bah, that doesn't work
(12:42:39) sethk_: heh, I did xrdb -all -remove
(12:43:45) sethk_: thought I had it. oh well, it must be being overridden by a translation
(12:44:25) sethk_: well, I give up on that, but if you need other Alt+ mappings, you can use a similar pattern with the ASCII codes

Lately, this happened again when I installed a Debian box. So here is a list of random facts that hopefully will jog me into solving the problem:

• When I installed FC3 on my main workstation, I had this problem.
• When I installed Mandrake 10.2b1 on my main workstation, I did not have the problem.
• When I installed FC4 on my main workstatoin, I did not have the problem.
• When I installed Debian on my laptop, I have the problem.
• I cannot find any GNOME keyboard settings dialogue that has any effect on the problem.
• I am not sure what X settings to check that might affect this problem.

Now some random facts about the problem on my Debian laptop:

• When I start a text terminal, I do not have the problem.
• When I become root ("sudo bash"), I do not have the problem.
• When I become root ("sudo bash") then any normal user again ("su - anynormaluser") the problem returns.

Initial looks at environment variables, .profile, /etc/profile, /etc/bash.bashrc, etc don't reveal anything that would make this happen, which is okay, since I suspect it's an X thing.