+*** Mandrake
+
+The Mandrake Linux distribution is attempting to comprehensively
+update the user interface, and make it consistent across
+applications. This is very difficult, and will occasionally cause
+conflicts with applications like Emacs with their own long-established
+interfaces. Known issues specific to Mandrake or especially common:
+
+Some versions of XEmacs (21.1.9 is known) distributed with Mandrake
+were patched to make the Meta and Alt keysyms synonymous. These
+normally work as expected in the Mandrake environment. However,
+custom-built XEmacsen (including all 21.2 betas) will "inexplicably"
+not respect the "Alt-invokes-Meta-commands" convention. See "I want
+XEmacs to use the Alt key" below.
+
+The color-gcc wrapper (see below) is in common use on the Mandrake
+platform.
+
+*** I want XEmacs to use the Alt key, not the XXX key, for Meta commands
+
+For historical reasons, XEmacs looks for a Meta key, then an Alt key.
+It binds Meta commands to the X11 modifier bit attached to the first
+of these it finds. On PCs, the Windows key is often assigned the Meta
+bit, but many desktop environments go to great lengths to get all apps
+to use the Alt key, and reserve the Windows key to (sensibly enough)
+the window manager.
+
+One correct way to implement this was suggested on comp.emacs.xemacs
+(by Kilian Foth and in more detail by Michael Piotrowski): unmap the
+Meta modifier using xmodmap or xkb, and then map the Meta/Windows key
+to the Super or Hyper keysym and an appropriate mod bit. XEmacs will
+not find the Meta keysym, and default to using the Alt key for Meta
+keybindings. Typically few applications use the (X11) Meta modifier;
+it is tedious but not too much so to teach the ones you need to use
+Super instead of Meta. There may be further useful hints in the
+discussion of keymapping on non-Linux platforms.
+
+*** The color-gcc wrapper
+
+This wrapper colorizes the error messages from gcc. By default XEmacs
+does not interpret the escape sequences used to generate colors,
+resulting in a cluttered, hard-to-read buffer. You can remove the
+wrapper, or defeat the wrapper colorization in Emacs process buffers
+by editing the "nocolor" attribute in /etc/colorgccrc:
+
+$ diff -u /etc/colorgccrc.old /etc/colorgccrc
+--- /etc/colorgccrc.old Tue Dec 26 02:17:46 2000
++++ /etc/colorgccrc Tue Dec 26 02:15:48 2000
+@@ -34,1 +34,1 @@
+-nocolor: dumb
++nocolor: dumb emacs
+
+If you want colorization in your Emacs buffers, you may get good
+results from the ansi-color.el library:
+
+http://www.geocities.com/kensanata/color-emacs.html#ansicolors
+
+This is written for the mainline GNU Emacs but the author has made
+efforts to adapt it to XEmacs. YMMV.
+