Onboard

Keyboard unuseable in Ubuntu chroot via xrdp or vnc in Android

Bug #1001736 reported by 白い熊
36
This bug affects 7 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Onboard
Confirmed
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 (but affects all earlier versions - tested) in a chroot on an Android tablet.

X is accessed via xrdp or tightvnc via a client software on the Android tablet - this is the only way to run GNU/Linux chroot in Android.

Onboard starts when run, however all the keys have question marks instead of characters displayed in them, and the spacebar shows: "No X keyboard found, retrying..."

Console gives me series of: "2012-05-19 17:56:33,201:WARNING:OnboardGtk: vk XKbGetKeyboard failed to get keyboard from x server" errors.

I thought this was because due to running X via an xrdp or a vnc server for the GUI, there is no xorg configuration setting the screen size and thought onboard uses this to configure itself to get the right location and size. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. My notebook, running also Ubuntu 12.04 has just the skeleton /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
 Identifier "Default Device"
 Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

Putting this xorg.conf in /etc/X11/ in the chroot, onboard still runs with the same fatal symptoms as above.

How can this be fixed?

Revision history for this message
marmuta (marmuta) wrote :

This is actually Onboard's error handling working as intended. X doesn't seem to have a keyboard device configured there. Onboard's key labels come from xkb and if there is no core keyboard there are no labels to be read.
Since this is an Android device (Android kernel?), it perhaps doesn't expect to have a keyboard configured. There may be other ways to do this nowadays, but have you tried setting one up in xorg.conf. Something like (didn't test, adapt as needed):

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier "Simple Layout"
        InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "Keyboard1"
        Driver "kbd"
        Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
        Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Revision history for this message
marmuta (marmuta) wrote :

白い熊, has anything changed? Have you been able to set up a keyboard device in the meantime?

Changed in onboard:
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
白い熊 (6-launchpad-net-sumou-com) wrote :

No, I tried the recommendation and variations. Still the same.

My guess is that due to VNC access the xorg.conf file is not even read when tightvncserver starts the X session. My prob is with vnc I'm not sure how to debug to get some log output to see what's going on...

Revision history for this message
marmuta (marmuta) wrote :

I was thinking if we could perhaps provide some kind of fall-back mode with hard-coded (English) layout, ignoring the system's language-specific layouts (if there are any at all). Not sure if that helped you a lot, but it would be an improvement over the question marks.
I have a hunch though, that we won't be able to fake key events without a core keyboard. Needs some experimenting.
I'll mark this wish list for now.

Changed in onboard:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Paolo Casaschi (paolocasaschi) wrote :

I have the same issue… 12 years after the original bug report.

Anyone with a suggestion how to fix this for Ubuntu 24.04?

Thanks.

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