I am a Linux user, and I recently got an eMachines laptop. Since I'm Uruguayan, my mother tongue is Spanish, and that presented a problem: laptops usually have an American-style keyboard, and Spanish (as well as Portuguese, French, German, and other languages) requires some special keys that aren't on American keyboards. Here's how you can get international characters on your American keyboard -- and as a bonus, we'll see how you can enable the special "media" or "Internet" keys on some keyboards that aren't supported by Linux out of the box.