Here's a current working version of Xkbd for the N800 only.

If you're interested in using this on a N810 I might have a few ideas for you to throw around and try. As for the N900, I wouldn't have a clue.

Install bash2 from app manager if you already haven't done so. If you launch a keyboard in Xterm, closing out Xterm will also close the keyboard as well. If you don't have bash2, sometimes the keyboard will stick on the screen.

Download, unzip, and put the Keyboards folder on your external memory card (media/mmc2/).
Keyboards.zip

Open up the Xkbd install.note file in the folder, edit, select all, copy, open Xterm, edit, then paste

If for some reason you ever reboot the device or your hildon keyboard stops from showing up on the screen, open up the Restore keyboards.note file in the folder, edit, select all, copy, open Xterm, edit, then paste. This only needs to be done once as far as I can tell.

One possible issue might be if you try and use a BT keyboard, but I'm not all too sure about this. The other thing is if you want to use a Xkbd layout that's created for a different language.

Anyway, there's a backup of that base file in the Keyboards folder.

There's a Keyboards.note file that you can copy and paste to launch the various layouts that come in the folder.

Side and Garnet keyboards both need to been launched with the screen rotated.

There are right and left invisible arrow keys on the left side of Garnet VM and up and down invisible arrow keys on the right side of it. Once you try it, you'll understand how simple it is to use them.

This version also stops the keys repeating like they have done in the past which makes using Xkbd so much more manageable.


*Technical Details on this hack*

From a fresh reboot, running setxkbmap -print in Xterm produced this result:
xkb_keymap {
xkb_keycodes { include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)" };
xkb_types { include "complete" };
xkb_compat { include "complete" };
xkb_symbols { include "pc+us" };
xkb_geometry { include "pc(pc105)" };

Then, after running this in Xterm:
gconftool-2 --set -t bool /system/osso/af/keyboard-attached true && sleep 2 && gconftool-2 --set -t bool /system/osso/af/keyboard-attached false

It produced this result after running setxkbmap -print again:
xkb_keycodes { include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)" };
xkb_types { include "complete" };
xkb_compat { include "complete" };
xkb_symbols { include "nokia_vndr/su-8w(us)" };
xkb_geometry { include "pc(pc104)" };

So in the file
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base
I made two simple edits.

* = pc(pc104) to * = pc(pc105)
and
nokiasu8w * = nokia_vndr/su-8w(%I) to nokiasu8w * = pc+us

so that it would once again match the initial settings given by the setxkbmap -print output.

I think Xkbd is calling an inappropriate mode_switch command somewhere in the coding if anyone wants to take a look at it so that hacking the OS would no longer be necessary.

It would also be great if someone ever got around to figuring out why it stills gives off this error when running Xkbd.
Sorry - server Keyboard map doesn't contain either 2 or 4 KeySyms per Keycode - unsupported!

Screen shots