I want something that works well with the home media setup.  I was using 
an ordinary, cheap wireless keyboard/mouse, actually two different ones, 
both worked fine from within 4-5 feet, but they didn't do well at about 7 
feet and I need them for that distance.  It turns out that everyone 
promises 10 meters, but the cheaper keyboards are all lying.

Next I upgraded to a keyboard with a built-in trackball.  It was the 
ADESSO WKB-3000UB:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823166079

I loved that.  What a great design and such a nice feel.  Unfortunately, 
it worked great for only a few days and by day 6 I couldn't get it to do 
much of anything.  Also, it started causing nautilus to launch literally 
hundreds of file browsers.  My experience -- having it work at first, and 
later fail -- seems to have been shared by many other people who commented 
on Amazon.com.  So I brought it back to Microcenter.

While at Microcenter tonight I picked up one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823176018

I just started using it, but right now it is working.  The problem with 
this one is that I just don't like it nearly as much as the Adesso -- the 
trackball doesn't feel as good and it is so small that I have to use the 
function key to access Ins, Home, End, PgDn and PgUp.


Does anyone have any good tips on what is good and works well on Linux 
systems?  (I'm using Ubuntu.)  The Adesso failure might have had something 
to do with the Linux system, but maybe not.  It doesn't seem like any 
keyboard manufacturer promises Linux compatibility.

Mike