[Arm-netbook] Building your own keyboard

[Christopher Havel]

I *think* the ones I prefer are therefore TKL in that nomenclature... I
usually just call them "mini" or "compact". The ones that advertise as
having an "embedded numpad" which I never ever use or need.

See --> Adesso or SolidTek ACK-595, pretty much my ideal keyboard.
PgUp/PgDn/Home/End on the right edge, up against the cursor (arrow) keys,
with the rest of the usual modifiers (etc) in weird places because that's
where they fit. The one in front of me right now (part of a homemade laptop
that is the inspiration for my previously-and-briefly-mentioned AnyTop
project) has only one Ctrl key, the tilde is between left Alt and spacebar,
Ins and Del are between the context menu key and the cursor keys. PrtSc,
Scroll Lock (what does that even do?) and Pause are up in the upper-right
corner squashed in after NumLock.

OFF TOPIC RAMBLING RANT because I'll explode if I don't.

I'm writing novels now (yes, plural, one's being edited as I write the
sequel... there's a story as to how that all came about) and that homemade
laptop is my writing box. Of course I corked it with a kernel update last
night (ironically I was trying to get it working *better*), so I've got to
torture it back into working somehow... that's not going very well right
now... see, the system unit is one of those Z3735F based stick computers
(think Intel Compute Stick, but generic... this one's a MeeGoPad T02) and
on Mint the sound, WiFi, and BT don't work by default because the chipsets
are effin' weird. The cherry on the whipped cream on the cake is that this
64bit system has 32bit UEFI because eff everybody (sorry for implied
language, but I'm kinda foaming at the mouth here) so Mint's default
installer goes "WTF IS THIS S***?!?!?!" and dies when it tries to install
the bootloader. Of course that's not the absolute last thing the installer
has to do, so I've got to try and torture it into working or find another
OS, which I don't want to do TBH. Mint is freaking *fast*.

I think I'm going to just set it aside for now. There's an Australian bloke
calls himself Linuxium who's working on a solution... I think I'll let him
work this crap out before I go bald. The downside is that he's taking his
bloody dang time to get it going, and I've writing to do.

Maybe I'll try Ubuntu. I hear it's a little more graceful in how well it
installs on this hardware. Besides, I want to look at that new Budgie
desktop environment, just to see what it's like and to play around with it.

OK I'm done.