Alt-bucky-cokebottle

I had a problem with X recently; after a restart, the Alt and Windows/Menu keys on my Microsoft Natural keyboard did not seem to work with X.org. I'm running Debian testing and I upgrade weekly, yet an X session might not restart for a long time...so it's hard to be sure when this started.

I finally managed to track it down to an error that could be shown like so:

$ setxkbmap -print | xkbcomp - $DISPLAY

Error:            No Geometry named "microsoft" in the include file "pc"
                  Exiting
                  Abandoning geometry file "(null)"

This error also showed up in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. After much, much, much searching I finally came across this ten-year old posting to comp.os.linux.misc from who I'm pretty sure is this guy. And it worked a treat: by adding the line

Option  "XkbGeometry"   "pc"

to the keyboard section, poof! all my windows-menu-alt keys have come back.