German Keyboard on Apple Powerbook5,6
20050711 Bernhard <bernhard at intevation.de>

Hardware:
Apple Powerbook 5,6 (post-February 2005 Powerbook) with German keyboard.

Others have wonderful pages about GNU/Linux installation:
Jochen Voss: http://seehuhn.de/comp/powerbook/          
Johannes Berg: http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/PowerBook

I am running Debian GNU/Linux with a 2.6.x kernel 
and made the following modifications to make my keyboard functional under X11.
Basically this worked similar with XFree from Debian Sarge and Xorg 6.8.2.

Note: I have not looked at Jochen's xkb work, 
the following is a hack that I did quickly for myself.

/etc/X11/
In xorg.conf and XF86Config-4 I made sure that in Section "InputDevice"
I have
	Option 		"LeftAlt" "Meta"
	Option 		"RightAlt" "Meta"
#	Option		"XkbModel"	"macintosh"
	Option		"XkbLayout"	"de"
	Option		"XkbVariant"	"nodeadkeys"
so the xfree86 keycodes get used and I patched them
to give me circumflexes and the alt-gr key similiar to a German keyboard.
see
	xorg-6.8.99.7-powerbook5,6-de-keycodes.patch

In the future the kernel might fix the switch between the <> and ^° keys.
Then you would see a switch with my patch and you can leave that part out.