On Mon, 3 Jan 2011, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:

quoted text
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> Note that it uses Latin1 only by default, but you can get full access
> to Unicode with LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 set.

Just found the problem. I was setting LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" in 
.xsession, as suggested by stsp@ at

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20100729233638

This was having no effect in Xorg at all. In firefox, when typing an 
accented character, I was getting:

** (firefox-bin:13132): WARNING **: Error converting text from IM to
UTF-8: Invalid byte sequence in conversion input

Just put all the stuff I normally put in .xsession in .xinitrc (like 
setting LC_CTYPE). Problem solved. In other words, has nothing to do 
with configuring keyboard layout in Xorg.

Thanks for helping.