Keeping in mind that touch-screens are being used more and more, it wouldn't hurt to have a proper virtual keyboard easily available on the login screen.
On my Helix2 I tried a few and currently have "florence" in use but frankly the ones on offer in the repositories all suck big time. Florence has some serious issues: it keeps the mouse pointer captive so the only way to remove/stop it is via touch, which isn't always available.
This availability is another issue as the Helix2 has a wacom stylus that will not work if touch is enabled .... and vice versa. To be fair this is an issue on Ubuntu too.
Im not sure if E17 has an emodule for virtual keyboard, and maybe you can install a generic one from packages, but if i recall correctly there's a virtual keyboard module for E22 
