The version of the GNU assembler shipped with Fedora 10
(2.18.50.0.9-8.fc10) complains about character literals in some of our
assembly code.  Changing $'x' to $( 'x' ) seems to fix the problem.
Yes, the whitespace is required; using just $('x') does not work.

Reported by Kevin O'Connor <kevin@koconnor.net>.