Affordable, Compact Keyboards?

green pizza asks: "I'm in charge of building a lab of internet kiosk-style PCs for my local library. We have already settled on locally built Mini-PCs and will be netbooting the machines into a simplified Linux environment based heavily on JWZ's experiences in this area. We're cramped for space and luckily have been donated plenty of 15" LCDs. The only remaining issue has been keyboards. A supply of generic $5 keyboards would almost work, but we're already short on table space. I would really like to use low profile keyboards, as we have no need for a numeric keypad, F-keys, or media/shortcut keys. The Happy Hacking Keyboard series is almost perfect, but its build quality is overkill and the price is way beyond the $25 or so we'd like to spend. Anyone know of a bargain Google/Froogle is overlooking?"

Comments

They exist

[etymxris]

Go here, then search for all keyboards with "notebook" layout. I'd link to the search directly, but deep linking like that doesn't work on newegg.

Notebook Keyboards !=duarble

[quantumraptor]

I administered a setup like this for a library in the New york area, and our initial keyboards, IBM notebook keyboard/touchpads broke within one month of their first use. We replaced them with IBM Clickity-Clickity Model M keyboards, and they have lasted ever since (about 4 years).

You may want to rethink this.

[syukton]

No need for a numeric keypad or fkeys? Never pressed F5 to refresh eh? F2 to open a new location in a browser? heh. Sounds like you need more tables instead of crappy keyboards. Keep in mind that a lot of people are comfortable with a certain kind of keyboard, and giving them laptop-like keyboards with small keys that are hard to type on may just deter their usage and make your whole computer lab project a giant waste of money.