Alt key on MacOSX X11 server

Performance of the IntelliJ IDEA on my MAC has recently been far from optimal (despite 4Gigs of RAM, without which it just did not run), so I decided to steal some cycles from my colleagues Quad Core server.

All seemed fine (after installing half of dev environment, thanks Lukasz for claiming the machine is ready while it didn't even had sshd or java ;-) ) except for one tiny detail: X11 server on Mac did not pass the Alt key, which IDEA on Linux seems to like a lot.

After half a day of googling (lunch included) I managed to find the solution:

1. make sure X11 works at all (beyond scope of this post)
   
2. enable plain X11 network access (ssh tunneling causes too much latency to use it comfortably):
   after starting the X11 server:
   xhost +paulaner (where paulaner is the name or the address of the server)
   
3. get the Alt keys working (inspired by this post)
   prepare ~/.xmodmap according to the post
   run xmodmap ~/.xmodmap when suitable to have your Alt keys (hint with .xinitrc did not work for me, though - it destroyed more than it fixed)
   

All of this is obvious once you know what exactly you need to do.
Happy development over X11 :-)