Portuguese accents on the EeePC

I had for some time not been able to type Portuguese accented characters on my EeePC 901 (Xandros + Advanced Desktop) other than by use of kcharselect. This latter works fine if you just need a very occassional accented character but is not at all suitable for writing in Portuguese.
Then I came across this thread, the post #5 of which gives a detailed guide to getting accented characters from the English-International Keyboard Layout.
The method consists of:
i) Change to English-International keyboard layout
ii) remove gcin using the command

sudo aptitude remove --purge xandros-gcin

In regard to this last, I actually used Synaptic to remove
gcin, gcin-qt3-immodule and xandros-gcin

Now I could type accented characters from the US (Intl variant) using the table in the thread above.
However, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that I could now also get all the accented characters from the BR keyboard layout.
Note also that the US-Intl keyboard is not at all required (as you would expect) for the accents to be available in the BR keyoard layout.