Those are a very good match to what I want as well. When you figure out how to make it permanent, I'd love to see this as an installable package. Then we'd have something to hold us until generalized mapping became possible. ;-)

Thanks for this. I'm not familiar with xkb mappings and on the road now, so quick question: can you, or did you already - didn't notice - map the Meta/Alt key somewhere. I sorely need it for Emacs, succeeded in ompiling it before borking the N900 with all the dev stuff.

If you didn't map it, can you propose a coded map, since you're somewhat more familiar with it than me?

Oh, and how about ESC?

BTW, I've found this: http://upir.cz/maemo/keyboards/

It's in the extras-devel repository as ukeyboard, and it's got some hardware keyboards, but they're borked on the N900, for instancee the Slovak keyboard has some redefines, but the RET key acts funny, but perhaps just some source modification needed and this will give us a power hardware keyboard, also between reboots...

I have the following keys working with only modifying the rx-51 file and rebooting:
fn+z=>tilde
fn+c=>pipe
fn+left=>escape
fn+right=>tab

The only two keys that don't seem to work are:
fn+up=>page up
fn+down=>page down

The lines that don't seem to work for those entries are:

key <UP> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Up, PageUp ] };
key <DOWN> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Down, PageDown ] };

Anyone have any suggestions? I also tried PgDown/PgUp, but that didn't work either.

On a 4-level key, does anyone know how to get the item in the 4th column?
1st: no modifiers
2nd: shift
3rd: fn
4th: ?

I tried fn+shift, but that didn't work. It would be great if we could get that 4th column working to have other keys like {, }, <, >, [, ], `, etc. Otherwise, I won't be able to program on the device after all

What level is Ctrl?

I'm not sure... one of the few places I saw the 4th level differ from the 3rd is on the french keyboard. Maybe someone who's used a french n900 can tell us how they get to the 4th symbol for a particular key.

ukeyboard seems to work nicely here. I imagine it would be fairly easy to use it and adapt the available keyboards. However, this would mean to replicate "advanced" layouts for any thinkable language, assuming non-English users are interested in this. I would hope there is a way that works "on top of" the normal keyboard layout.

Wait a sec, were you able to use at least one of the hardware keyboards in ukeyboard? I think it only adds two, slovak and czech, but I seemed to have probs with enter stopping working then and so.

You had no probs? I really would like to derive a dvorak keyboard, hardware that is, ukeyboard already has a dvorak virtual one, is OK.

I checked the sources, but am not completely sure how to setup the hardware dvorak keyboard there, did you take a look at them and do you have an idea how to set up one hardware keyboard there?

I don't think control works with the keys (at least it didn't in any combination i could think to try).