Getting Spanish keyboard layout working well on a MacBook running Ubuntu

When I started learning Spanish I decided that I would run a lot of my computing environment in Spanish in order to familarise myself with the language, especially the terms used in computing and IT. When I moved to Spain I also started to use the Spanish keyboard layout frequently, which is very useful for writing Spanish and other Latin based languages because it contains keys for easily accenting characters.

So for example, some accented characters require a single keystroke or simple use of the shift key (ñ,Ñ,ç,Ç,º,ª) and some can obtained with a two-key compose sequence (à, á, â, ä, è, é, ê, ë, ò, ó, ô, ö, ù, ú, û, ü, ý, ÿ, ì, í, î, ï, ŕ, ń, ź, ć ś, ĺ) and some using a third-modifier key like right-apple-key / alt-gr (æ, ł, €, ø, þ, ß, ð, đ, ŋ, ħ, ĸ, µ). It's even possible to get some useful symbols easily using just one modifier key («, », º, ª, ·, ¦, ¿, ¡) and also the accents on their tod with the compose key followed by the space bar (^, `, ', ", ~).

Anyway great for all those weirdy European language characters, as I'm sure you'll agree - although I can't seem to get the Welsh language's 'w' with a caret/circumflex (^) over it very easily. In HTML you can get others from this URL http://www.computertorture.com/xhtml/character.xhtml but not this one. Weird as it's an important letter in Welsh and there must be a way to do it??

I was having trouble getting the layout to work under Ubuntu 8.04, but here's how I did it:

First go to Preferences -> Keyboard Shoutcuts and reassign to 'Switch to workspace to the left' to be Control-Shift-Left and likewise 'Switch to workspace to the right' to be Control-Shift-Right (both of these are right at the bottom of the list, so scroll down!).

This frees up the Alt (also known as Command) key for use as the third-level-modifier.

Then go to Preferences->Keyboard and the Layouts tab. Once here, select the 'Keyboard model' to be 'MacBook/MacBook Pro (Intl)' and then add the layout by clicking the 'Add' button. Here you want to select 'Spain' as the layout and 'Spain Macintosh' as the variant.

Then choose 'Layout options' button and here you need to expand 'Third level choosers' and choose the option 'Press Left Alt key to choose 3rd level'.

That's it.