We have been able to get VA Smalltalk running on Fedora Core 6 by making some symbolic links:
cd to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
create a symbolic link -- ln -s /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB XKeysymDB
cd to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale
make symbolic links to
/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8
/usr/share/X11/locale/locale.alias
/usr/share/X11/locale/locale.dir
After making these links, VA Smalltalk should start up without any locale or Keysym errors.
Alternatively you can copy the files, if you do not want to create the symbolic links.
This technique will likely work with other unsupported Linux distributions as well.
We are working on a more permanent solution.