@changoMarango You are definitely thinking along the right lines …
I started with bluefin by testing it in a VM first. That worked out really well. And then I moved to an external USB drive so I could get closer to the hardware before committing to reinstall on the internal nvme drive.
Because your printer is accessed via WiFi this should be a no brainer. I do have a couple of thoughts.
- install in a VM first (using virt/qemu or Boxes) or external drive
- you can install your driver via package overlays but this should be a last resort; but can be a powerful option. Just keep a good log of what you do so you can back it out if need be for an update; then reapply after update is done
- It should also be possible to install it in a distrobox although there will be some complexity to exposing the pieces (in and out) that are needed. For example the device in /dev, the wifi device in /dev will probably be needed in the distrobox, and the host will need the software required to access the printer exported from the distrobox
- also - do you really need the 32-bit stuff at this point? You might depending on the software you use. But that would reduce the problem slightly if you don’t really need them.
The keyboard should be a little easier. The /etc filesystem is read-write. You can modify or add anything you need in there. Just the /usr filesystem is read-only. See below for the link to an article I wrote summarizing how this works with ostree based systems.
So, adding /etc/udev/rules.d/50-zsa.rules is straight-forward.
The wally app is written in go and react (javascript). You should be able to install these pieces in your host $HOME dir structure. Place the wally.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/wally.desktop and GNOME will pick it up from there. I use ~/.local/bin and ~/.local/lib and ~/.local/lib64 for my local installs.
It was not immediately obvious what the app architecture of keymapp is like. But the install instructions suggest it is a go executable as well. I would put it in ~/.local/bin as well.
For the required dependencies, I would install them in a distrobox and export them into ~/.local/lib64 which should probably be in LD_LIBRARY_PATH:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.local/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
It all sounds very doable. Hope my desktop exercise was helpful.
Here is the article link mentioned above:
Enjoy. Sounds like fun!