after much googling, reading the wiki, and some pm help from members here, I feel I have a usable keyboard.

my xterm bottom screen "strip" now reads
pointer, tab, esc, . (period), >, |, -, /

my rational was, get the period up there so you can hit fn x 2 to lock number pad, and then you can easily type and ip address (say for ssh or ping) without annoyingly having to hit stuff individually. the -, and / now mean no more stretching and hitting fn to go into the directory structure (like cd'ing into the the structure) and now putting options such as ls -ltr is much faster (no more fn plus stretch to the f key).

then on the hardware keyboard I mapped, whatever the hell is above the z to a `(backtick), whatever the hell is above the c to a ^, the v fn to the < symbol (don't need / as it is now on the far right of the bottom screen strip), left arrow shift to [, right arrow shift to ], left arrow fn to {, right arrow fn to }, shift down arrow to % and up arrow shift to ~. Finally I have fn up arrow and fn down arrow mapped to page up and page down.

honestly I don't foresee having to hit fn/sym to get to the symbols any time soon and simply traversing the directory structure and putting options on commands is much faster due to / and - on the far right of the bottom strip of the virtual keys.

now I feel I actually have a chance to learn on the device, shell scripting and perhaps perl in the debian chroot. things are just so much faster.

anyway just thought I'd share, and advocate anyone really wanting to use the device for command line stuff, mod the hardware and software terminal keys to your liking....it will really open up the device to you...