altkey() down, up & halfway down

[Richmond]

Is it just me, or . . . ?

So, here I am, during my luch break, at home, AND . . .

having had "No joy" with this on my G3 iMac running Mac OS 10.4 at the 
school:

on mouseUp
    if the altKey is down then
      put "down" into fld "fOUTPUT"
    end if
end mouseUp

it works on MacINTEL 10.6.7 !!!!!

but NOT on Xubuntu 12.10.

Do INTEL Macs send rawKey messages from modifier keys, while
PPC Macs do not?