Before I speculate on more details about this problem, let me add that
pdecat's persistent fix works fine but requires an additional `update-
initramfs -u -k all` for the option to be set correctly.

I own two Apple aluminium keyboards of different generations (German
layout) , one MacBook Air and one old Early-2008 white MacBook. While
the laptops seem to work fine for quite some time now, both alu
keyboards experienced this issue in different Ubuntu releases; at least
one of them always suffers from it up until today. (Count this as
confirmed for Quantal.)

In the past, I used the xmodmap fix from above, but that didn't work out now 
because of Bug #1016996. Since I didn't know about pdecat's fix at first, I 
dived a bit into the shady areas of XKB configuration and found out that XKB 
offers options called "apple:badmap" and 'apple:goodmap' targeting the exact 
same problem. Those are listed in "/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base" and 
`[…]/evdev`, but not in the respective `.lst` and `.xml` files and therefore 
don't show up in the GNOME keyboard options dialog.
When it comes to persisent configuration, I didn't succeed in settings the 
options via `xorg.conf` as described by [1] and [2].  Running `setxkbmap […]` 
at session start through `gnome-session-properties` works in principal, but 
seems to conflict with settings from the GNOME keyboard options. (Only one of 
them will be set due to what seems to be some kind of race-condition.) What 
worked for me was running the command via `.profile`, but just then I came 
across pdecat's much simpler and system-wide approach :-).

As there seem to be different generations of Apple keyboards with different 
behaviours out there, I believe that there won't be a general fix for this 
problem.
What should however be done in my opinion, is offering a simple way to get the 
right configuration. I think the GNOME keyboard options are the right place to 
do that, and therefore the "apple:badmap" option  should be added to the `.lst` 
and `.xml` files like described above. That's why I'm adding xkeyboard-config 
to the affected packages.


[1] http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook#X11_.28X_Window.29
[2] 
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Apple_Keyboard#.3C_and_.3E_have_changed_place_with_.C2.A7_and_.C2.BD

** Also affects: xkeyboard-config (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/214786

Title:
  Apple USB ISO keyboard has incorrectly swapped keys

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