onboard - issues displaying the on-screen keyboard

[christianstrauch]

I am experiencing display issues using the onboard on-screen keyboard as shown in the attached images. Modifying text/key sizes does not resolve the issue. Neither does removing and reinstalling the onboard-common, onboard, onboard-data packages.

[mgrouch]

What is the output of

cat /etc/bbn-build

[mgrouch]

Does this problem happen when you connect monitor directly without VNC? Is this fresh install?

[christianstrauch]

• /etc/bbn-build contains 2023-07-23 18:29:49+00:00
• The problem occurs with or without VNC
• This is a same-day, fresh installation

[mgrouch]

Can you post files you have in /home/user/.local/share/onboard ?

Did you modify anything manually? I see that desktop is missing other elements, like notice about freepik icons, night mode controls.

Did you install everything initially with monitor connected? It seems desktop didn’t detect screen resolution and misplaced things.

I think you can try re-burning (preferably different) SD card and trying again booting with monitor connected.

Is your screen HDMI or DSI?

thanks

[christianstrauch]

My monitor is a 9" 1080p touchscreen (chalkelec) connected via HDMI and USB. I did modify a few things, but nothing fundamental. I'm intending to change the template for the panel (including different icons) - that's why I removed the credit (with the night controls which I'll bring back soon). Everything else in the UI (except for onboard) is working, however:

The screen hadn't been detected on first boot, but it was on a subsequent reboot. It was then used with 720p resolution. Switching to 1080p works, too. xrandr says: Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 720, maximum 7680 x 7680 HDMI-1 connected primary 1280x720+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 16mm x 9mm 1280x720 60.00*+ 50.00 59.94 1920x1080 60.00 50.00 59.94 30.00 29.97 1920x1080i 60.00 50.00 59.94 1024x768 60.00 800x600 60.32 720x576 50.00 720x480 60.00 59.94 640x480 60.00 59.94 Executing xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode 1920x1080 resizes the screen perfectly fine but onboard still behaves weird.

• The touchscreen had been recognized as "tablet" by X which obviously wouldn't work so I had to create an udev rule to fix that. It now works and is calibrated
• Here's the ~/.config/openbox folder user-.config-openbox.zip

[mgrouch]

Can you exit onboard and just run it from command line in terminal window to see if it prints any errors?

Was onboard ever showing properly for you or it started breaking after some changes?

[christianstrauch]

It showed up fine at first but broke while using it. Here are the warnings generated when running it interactively.

At this point, I'm not sure I'm still using the originally selected theme tho - I switched themes to see if there was an issue with any of them (but that didn't help).

[mgrouch]

Looks like result of you playing with keyboard language settings. You seem replaced ibus (default language manager) with something else. Per screenshots all letters disappeared on your keyboard.

I suggest full reinstall and using ibus for adding additional language keyboards.

[christianstrauch]

Where are you getting this assumption about keyboard language settings from? I have not "played" with keyboard language whatsoever (English (US) has been the only one installed and never changed). I am a bit worried that this would happen randomly during operations - since it also appeared without me changing anything before. I am not sure re-imaging the SD card would solve this long term? What makes you think reinstalling would help? Which installation step do you assume needs to be repeated?

[christianstrauch]

Also, the letters did not disappear on the keyboard - the screenshot you are referring to shows the numeric keyboard. The issue mostly is around sizing - the size of the keyboard keeps changing and seems to be initially set to a very large size (something like 10 times the screen size). Also, if (sometimes) the keyboard starts vaguely appropriately, it shows a much larger version of itself in the background (see first screenshot).

[christianstrauch]

Issue is (temporarily, and only for me) fixed: My HDMI touchscreen device registers its physical size as 16x9 which onboard interprets as 16mm x 9mm. I patched onboard's WindowUtils.py to account for that:

def get_monitor_dimensions(window):
    """ Geometry and physical size of the monitor at window. """
    gdk_win = window.get_window()
    screen = window.get_screen()
    if gdk_win and screen:
        monitor = screen.get_monitor_at_window(gdk_win)
        r = screen.get_monitor_geometry(monitor)
        size = (r.width, r.height)
        size_mm = (screen.get_monitor_width_mm(monitor),
                   screen.get_monitor_height_mm(monitor))

        # Nexus7 simulation
        device = None       # keep this at None
        # device = 1

        # Chalkelec hack
        # There was already a "Nexus7 simulation" in here which coincidentally requires the same solution
        device = 2
        if device == 0:     # dimension unavailable
            size_mm = 0, 0
        elif device == 1:     # Nexus 7, as it should report
            size = 1280, 800
            size_mm = 150, 94
        elif device == 2:   # Chalkelec hack - the screen reports 16, 9 for some reason
            size_mm = 150, 94
        return size, size_mm
    else:
        return (0, 0), (0, 0)

[mgrouch]

On my installation I do not see the errors you are seeing when I start onboard from command line.

The first one is related to keyboard language.

But now I realized it might be due to you using VNC and might be unrelated.

[mgrouch]

Is your keyboard layout English US on the computer you VNC from?

[mgrouch]

Are you setting

hdmi_force_hotplug=1

in /boot/config.txt

?

[mgrouch]

Might be when you are booting with hdmi screen off and then VNC it just doesn’t know what are your screen parameters

[christianstrauch]

Looking at config.txt now. Regarding the other questions:

• The HDMI device is constantly plugged in. It is generally detected quite early, too.
• Keyboard layouts are English (US) everywhere - on the Pi, on the clients I use with VNC.
• VNC may or may not be connected when X starts - often it wasn't over the previous days. Doesn't change anything.

I'll update this thread once I'm done going through /boot/config.txt.

[christianstrauch]

So I modified config.txt to reflect all necessary parameters for my Chalkboard Electronics 7" touchscreen, including forcing HDMI on:

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_ignore_edid=0xa5000080
config_hdmi_boost=4
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=28
framebuffer_width=1280
framebuffer_height=800

This made things rather more difficult:

• the result of hdmi_force_hotplug=1 is that VNC can't connect any longer - it's running but the connection simply times out. Without hdmi_force_hotplug=1, it works fine. I also tried hdmi_force_hotplug=1 without the additional hardware specific settings, same result - VNC stops working.
• With the appropriate (above) settings for the HDMI output, X starts in 1080p resolution, even though hdmi_mode=28 stipulates 1280x800. Putting a screen specific config file in /etc/X11/conf.d/ works but disables VNC again.
• Letting X start in 1080p without hdmi_force_hotplug=1 but with my above hack for onboard and adding a gdm autostart script to run xrandr and change the resolution to 1080x800 during runtime works fine for both the HDMI output and VNC - but it's quite ugly (screen obviously resizes after startup), not really how it's supposed to be and I still don't understand why allow_hotplug=1 breaks VNC.

In parallel, I'm working on getting multitouch to work which seems to be quite a big deal too...

[mgrouch]

You can change headless resolution for VNC using raspi-config tool.

See: https://www.radishlogic.com/raspberry-pi/how-to-set-the-default-screen-resolution-for-vnc-viewer-when-raspberry-pi-is-not-connected-to-a-monitor/#Terminal