Best Way To Handle Ir Keyboards In Pdaxrom, Writing drivers, want feedback Options

[kopsis]

If I'm to stay with pdaXrom, it absolutely must let me use my Belkin IR keyboard with my C760! So I recently hacked up pdaXrom's virtual keyboard applet (Xvkbd) to give me that capability. It worked surprisingly well and got me through a business trip, but it isn't the perfect solution. The weaknesses of the Xvkbd approach are:

* Only works in X (doesn't work in console mode before you "startx" or after you exit X11).
* Has some performance issues (pegs CPU usage at 100% and is still sluggish in some apps).
* Not easy to add support for different IR keyboard types.

Since my return I've been looking at "kbdd" from Handhelds.org which is a user space keyboard driver that sends keystrokes directly to the Linux kernel. It was designed for the iPaq (which has no built in keyboard) so it will take some work to adapt it to the Zaurus. It addresses all three of the Xvkbd issues above, but it does introduces a couple new ones:

* No GUI app to activate/control the driver (easy enough to create but don't expect it in my first release).
* Built-in Zaurus keyboard won't work right when IR KB driver is running (this is the biggest issue).

My initial thinking is that despite those limitations Kbdd is still the right approach, but I'd like to get feedback from other IR keyboard users before I spend a bunch of time coding up my solution. I'd like my work to benefit the pdaXrom community so if you're an IR keyboard user and one approach or the other would result in something you couldn't use, here's your chance to let me know

Also, if you'd like to see support for a particular IR keyboard, feel free to reply with make and model. No guarantees, but I'll do what I can (short of buying new keyboards).