I searched for other threads on scrolling a web-page with the keyboard closed, and found one older one with an interesting suggestion: slide the keyboard out only enough to use the space-bar. I wouldn't have thought of that. My apologies if there is already another thread with a definitive answer to this question.

Anyway, I've given it some thought, and perhaps a workable solution would be to re-map one of the buttons that are available when the keyboard is closed to one of the scrolling functions, the way FBReader uses the zoom-in/zoom-out buttons for scrolling.

There are several options for buttons that could be used. Maybe the zoom-in/zoom-out buttons (I don't zoom much, since it slows down browsing a lot). Perhaps the little window button on the rocker above the back button (which I also don't use much).

There's also the question of which scrolling thing to use: either the page down (space) or the d-pad scrolling. Maybe tapping the scrolling key would scroll down by a page, and holding the key for a few seconds would scroll up by a page?

I'd be willing to look into coding some kind of hack up that could possibly do that. I'm experienced with Linux and Python, though I haven't done anything for the Maemo platform. Would anyone else be interested in this?

Very interested.

I'm new to the N810, but what a mongrel the thing is for interfaces.
In one app I may use the hard keyboard, the stylus, the thumbboard and the zoom keys.

I'd like to have a word with whoever moved the D-pad to the pullout.

Agreed. Moving the D-Pad was a big mistake usability-wise.

I've made a bit of progress. Following the advice here, I was able to log in as root and install xmodmap and xev. I then ran this command, hoping to set the window button to space:

xmodmap -e "keysym F5 = space"

This causes both a space character to be inserted, and also for the window menu to pop up. If only I could get rid of the window menu popping up, we'd have the solution.

I've given this project some more thought, and also read a bit about the low-volume problem as well, and I'm installing the Maemo SDK right now. For a while, I've been thinking to myself that it should be easy to go in and change the keyboard handling and volume limit in the source code, but now I'm not so sure that it's possible. Are the N810 volume manager and applications management program open source? If those are closed-source programs, then there might not be much more I can do.

This has been a long-time complaint of mine, but I finally have it fixed. When I'm reading a long essay on the web (such as this fine essay, for example) I don't like having to slide the keyboard open and press space in order to scroll down. My ultimate preference (perhaps with the N900) would be to have another rocker button on the right-side of the screen for scrolling. For now, though, I have a hack that seems to work. It basically involves turning off the normal action of the top half of the rocker button on the left side of the screen, and mapping that button to the space bar, which pages down in microb.

* Log into a console as root somehow
* Edit /etc/mce/mce.ini
* In the "[HomeKey]" section, set both of the following keys to "disabled":
* Run this command:
/etc/init.d/mce restart
* Edit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44
* Down near the bottom of the file, change the "key <FK05>" line to this:
* Reboot your n810
* Open up the web-browser, go to the essay I suggested, and you should be able to scroll page-by-page, just by tapping the "Home" key (you may have to tap once on the text before either the original space key or the newly-mapped button will work).

Honestly, this does cause some functionality to be lost. Perhaps it could be improved by setting the "LongAction" to whichever of the previous two functions you used more; I haven't tried it. Still, scrolling is vastly more useful than either of those other two functions, so I'm glad I figured this out. Let me know if you want to do this and need more details.

Well... That is a nice fix; thanks for solving it and especially for sharing.

That said, I've got two things:

First: Nokia are complete ******s, but I got a tablet made before they banished the d-pad from the device face !

Second (and perhaps more helpfully), there's a completely different approach to the problem taken over here; don't know if you saw it and just weren't happy, or if you didn't see it at all...

Neat! No, I wasn't aware of that approach. I'll have to try that out as well and compare.

As an addendum to the post with all the instructions above, I did experiment with setting the LongAction to display the list of running programs. That way, I could tap the key to scroll down one page (like space) and hold the button down for a few seconds to get the list of open applications. However, holding the button down lead to dozens of "space" key events being generated, which would scroll whatever article was being displayed down to the bottom long before the open applications were displayed. This means you couldn't just switch to another app and then back to the web-browser and resume reading. Oh well. I guess if you follow these steps, it means completely giving up the normal function of that button.

The Greasemonkey script TapScroll works wonders. It also allows you to have more usability from your keyboard.
p/n up/down half page
j/k up/down a line
l/h left/right scroll
f/b forward/back page
t to turn the onscreen buttons on or off for that page
g go to the top of the page

hope that helps