How to enter Greek characters in Emacs

Question

This page indicates that Greek letters can be inserted into Emacs by using M-i. However, Emacs 23.2.1 in a Debian Squeeze variant inserts the \"tab\" character when

Answer 1

To find out how to enter a single character that you already see somewhere on the screen, you can copy-paste that character to some emacs buffer/file, and then call M-x describe-char. With α, it yields

[...] to input: type "C-x 8 RET 3b1" or "C-x 8 RET GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA" [...]

PS: re your profile, try also ['a'] * 28