Github link: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry

Here’s a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDb8_ld9gOQ

I’ve been using it for almost two years now, and I’m not going back.

It’s based on a spare Blackberry Q10 keyboard and a custom Arduino-compatible board that reads the keyboard matrix and outputs it as USB HID to the phone. From the viewpoint of the phone, it’s just a regular USB keyboard, so no special software is needed.

But I do use a custom virtual keyboard to have just two rows of symbols that are not natively on the keyboard, as I didn’t want to add another layer of rarely used symbols that I’d have to memorize.

(On the image you can see Ubuntu with XFCE4 running on it. I chose Ubuntu because it’s what was easiest to get running in a chroot jail on the phone. I’m using VNC to display the GUI. I even managed to get FEX (x86/x64 emulator) and Wine running, so it runs x86/x64 Linux and Windows apps.)

  •  Square Singer   ( @squaresinger@feddit.de ) OP
    2•10 months ago

    I used LinuxDeploy, which is seriously outdated by now, but it works and it’s easy to use.

    You just need to update the chrooted Linux from e.g. Ubuntu 18.04 to something modern. But that’s not too hard.

    It could be possible to load phosh. I didn’t manage to get Gnome running (which phosh is based on afaik). But I guess if your Linux-fu is a bit better than mine, you might be able to get it to work.