Using a keyboard with Squeak on the Nokia 770/N800

Aaron Reichow revaaron at bitquabit.com
Thu Jun 21 17:28:06 UTC 2007


Hey all,

Just a little note- I've had some luck using my bluetooth Keyboard  
with my Nokia N800 and Squeak. I mention this specifically because  
with a keyboard, the Nokia N800/770 makes a cool little laptop- I'm  
building a simple laptopish case out of cardboard and because teh  
Maemo platform the Nokias run on is a bit funky with regards to  
input- e.g. unlike on CE, you don't have access to the OS-level  
software keyboard, etc to input into Squeak, and as such we've relied  
on Genie or soft-keyboards inside Squeak to input text. Since the KB  
doesn't support the HID profile, you have to use a driver.

Driver: http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/
Keyboard I'm using: http://www.freedominput.com/site/index.php? 
option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=28

The keyboard I'm using, but which uses the standard HID profile,  
which is a better way of doing things in many ways:
http://freedominput.com/site/index.php? 
option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=34

What is great about the Freedom BT keyboards is that unlike every  
other foldable I've seen they have a number row. Makes a huge  
difference if you're coding- on the IrDA keyboard I had for the  
Zaurus I had to press two keymodifiers to get a lot of punctuation  
chars like [, etc.  The keyboard has been working well, but no Alt-  
modifiers present or interpreted by the driver; Ctrl- and Shift-  
clicking work fine, and there is a key which seems to be mapped to  
escape which is handy for bringing up context menus.

Not sure if regular HID-compliant keyboards (which just work on the  
Nokias) work in Squeak, but I don't see why they wouldn't.

Just a little info for those wanting to make a novy-HandheldPC-cum- 
Dynabook out of a Nokia 770/N800. :)

Regards,
Aaron



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