http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...ed_characters/

Typing accentuated characters in Maemo is not the easiest nor the fastest action to perform. This is certainly not a huge issue for english speakers, but it may be for others.

Simple example : we french people love to put accents everywhere, because it's sooo much fun!
If you want to type the word "été" (french for summer), you have to type the following sequence :

Fn + Sym + accent + e + t + Fn + Sym + accent + e

That's a lot of keystrokes for a 3-letter word!

As many other languages make use of accentuated characters (i.e. German), improvement in this area would be much welcomed

You may ask (and you'd be right) : "Why don't you buy the n900 with a localized keyboard?" Well, they're currently harder to find, and some of us are not willing to sacrifice the 4 arrow keys.
From what I have read in the forums, I'm not the only one in that situation.

Thanks for your attention

See also here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Remapping_keyboard

or using different hardware kbdmap than display kbdmap?!

I dont know any other solutions to this...

maybe a rewritten osd-kbd for accents? showing up in the lower part of the display while typing with hardware-kbd?

I tried that (cheers debernardis ), and i must say it's a superb solution (for me, anyway)! It works perfectly and it's very handy to use.
However, I think somebody new to the linux world would find it difficult to achieve (with the chmod and vim editing required).