Comment 7 for bug 167290

OK the same for me here: alt works when X11 is not started by open
office.
from what I've read before there is a problem with the keymap used by X11

for non qwerty mac keyboards (in particular french keyboards). I ran into
this
problem with ubuntu where I could not type any special characters (such as
\
or | as pointed before). I had to modify the keymap according to some
comments on the forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=9127
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5989#c15
en francais:
http://www.linux-france.org/macintosh/clavier_v4.html
http://www.linux-france.org/macintosh/clavier_gentoo.html

maybe this would work with OS X too. but I'm afraid I won't have time to
test
before a while.