One area where the Linux experience is not as polished as Windows is keyboard customization. Yes, KDE provides a nice little configuration dialog with lots of national flags, but only for predefined layouts.
Long ago, I started out using xmodmap to redefine a few keys, and that worked well for quite a while. Then came xkb, which supposedly brings flexibility, power, and abstraction to keyboard customization. I could never find enough documentation to make it do what I wanted, so I went back to xmodmap, which I’ve been happily using ever since. I just run it from my KDE Autostart directory, and I’m good to go.
But now, here’s a recent and promising link I need to keep around (the reason for this blog post) and try later. Sometime after Christmas. http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Blog/custom-keyboard-in-linuxx11