It's been three months since I started looking for a new keyboard. Surprisingly, my current one, now pushing 23 years old, has recovered somewhat and now no longer bounces as much as it did. In the meantime I've been looking for a cheap Sun Type 7 keyboard, which looks relatively similar and has a USB connector:
In particular, there are 10 keys in 2 columns to the left of the main keyboard. Yes, I know, they have special functions under Solaris, but in the end they only generate scan codes, so I can modify a key map to get them to generate F1 to F10. SimilarlyI most sincerely hope!I can remap things to generate Ctrl and Meta in the correct places. The only concern there is that some broken keyboards have a hardware CapsLock key that can't be remapped, but I haven't heard of that from Sun.
The problem I had three months ago was that the only keyboards I could find were in the USA, and the postage would have been about double the price of the keyboard. So I put in a search on eBay Australia, and finally one showed up, postage only half the price of the keyboard.
But what do I need to connect it to my computer? I looked at a lot of web pages back in February, but I forgot to write them down. I won't make that mistake again. After a bit of searching, discovered that at least the Type 6 has its own keyboard description in X, and it seems that the Type 6 and Type 7 have the same scan codes, so there's very little to do. Still, I found a number of interesting pages, coincidentally several of them from FreeBSD users, though the information is not FreeBSD-specific. There's some interesting general detail on this page, though the most important is probably the link to this description of setting up XKB. One detail on that page is wrong, though: it refers to {XROOT}/lib/X11/xkb. Nowadays ${XROOT} expands to /usr/local, so this would be /usr/local/lib/X11/xkb, but in fact it's /usr/local/share/X11/xkb. Still, useful stuff. And it indicates that the keyboard should work, so I bought it.