Smart IBM PC/AT keyboard

[Muirium]

[sigh] Welcome to AndyLand, where nothing ever goes wrong... goes wrong... gones wrong...

Isn’t the whole point of putting a fiddly Linux PC inside a keyboard to give yourself circular, iterative, setup and maintenance headaches, though? Am I missing something?

[AndyJ]

Of course! It's ever so much more satisfactory than slamming your naughty bits in a desk drawer, too.

Generally, once you get the thing set up, it will run forever without further attention. I set some machines up back in 2007 that are still chugging along. Of course, they're not connected to the internet, so there are no worries about security stuff.

[AndyJ]

Ooo-kaaayyy...

I got blindsided again. The old-model Orange One I bought a couple of years ago works just fine. I thought that just because the Orange Pi web site hosted various Linux distributions for the Zero 3, that they would actually work. It turns out this is not the case. The Debian image was compiled without USB HID support, and though it's theoretically possible to cross-compile on another machine and copy the bits over, I'm not a C programmer and I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.

The Arch version works well enough... except Orange's package server went offline back around October of 2023, and nobody has been able to get them to respond to enquiries. It is, again, theoretically possible to download applications for some other ARM board, but I have no desire to turn the clock back to the 1990s and re-live "dependency hell".

So... I guess I'll just set the board aside for now. Arrgh.

[Muirium]

What's that SLAAAAAAAAM! I hear?

[AndyJ]

Heh, heh, heh...

I think I'll set this project aside a bit and concentrate on the xwhatsit conversion on the other F/AT. Sooner or later I'll find a board that will do what I want.