As part of my BeagleBone system, portability would improve if I didn't have to plug in a keyboard. As it turns out, there are several linux-compatible on-screen keyboard utilities that I can get for Debian and in particular in my case LDXE. I tried a few out; the one I like best is the boring-looking "Matchbox Keyboard". Interestingly, I found that it comes with the Debian distribution from BeagleBone. I tried "Florence"which looks lovely, except that when I installed it something went wrong with the colors or something and all the special function keys were blank even though their functions worked.
Here are some links:
Results from doing a package search right on debian.org: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=matchbox-keyboard