I had in ubuntu 7.10 a simple way to make french characters like the accent acute (a + ´) and accent grave (a + `).
I had us-intl keyboard and had mapped left alt to compose.
I would type compose (which i had mapped to L-Alt) + ` then a made the accent grave, compose + ´ then a made the accent acute.

Now that I´ve upgraded to Ubunto 8.04 getting the accent grave seems impossible!

Best I can do is press R-Win key then a and get accent acute but alas, impossible to get the a and e grave characters, despite reading many howtos on getting international characters working.

Any suggestions???

locale is:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Thanks!!

You could edit the keymap with xmodmap.