OT about Gnu/Linux (in service of Emacs)

[B. T. Raven]

I am trying to wean myself of the ms OSes but I am having trouble at 
every turn. On another ng devoted to the Red Hat distro I was told that 
it was enough to have Xmodmap in /etc/X11 in order to remap the mouse 
and mod keys but I still have to run xmodmap Xmodmap before the keyboard 
is set up the way I want it for Emacs. Does a script have to be put 
somewhere in order for the remapping to happen automatically for all 
users? Do I have to do it twice (once for root and once for ordinary 
user? This is on Fedora 8.

Thanks,

Ed