Onboard does not take desktop theme

[Till Kamppeter]

I am using the current ppa:onboard/ppa PPA version of onboard on an up-to-date Saucy system with the standard Unity desktop (Lenovo Thinkpad Twist convertible with touch screen, Intel Core i7 with on-chip GPU).

Onboard does not take the desktop theme. The keys are beige with black text, and not as the menus dark gray with white text.

The problem only happens on the Unity desktop. On the login screen of LightDM one can turn on onboard via the accessibility menu and there onboard always shows up correctly.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

Beige keys with black text: it seems that Onboard is using the Classic Onboard theme on your desktop. Could you please verify if "Follow system theme" is enabled in the Preferences of Onboard?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

"Follow system theme" was already marked in the Preferences.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

I suppose that you are using the Ambiance theme on your desktop. If so, could you tell us whether the Ambiance theme is available in the Preferences of Onboard?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Ambiance is in the list, but then the keyboard gets white with black text and some keys are colored, tab, caps lock, backspace, and enter get pink, both shift and space get orange, esc, the numbers, and the keys between the numbers and backspace get light pink. The theme which fits best to the menus is Nightshade.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

That's correct: the Ambiance theme looks like that (it has white, pink and orange keys); I suppose that the person, that designed the theme based it on the desktop background.

This said, it is not normal that you got the Classic Onboard theme on startup, unless it was set that way in your user preferences. On a vanilla Ubuntu system, Onboard should appear with the nightshade theme.

@marmuta (the main Onboard coder)

The package from the PPA installs a system defaults file where the theme is set to Nightshade.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I never manually set the Classic theme.

In the beginning I had always Nightshade and in the login screen I have still always Nightshade, the Classic theme on the desktop I got since I switched to the BZR version of Onboard and it continued when I switched to the PPA version. Now I have set Nightshade manually. "Follow system theme" I had always enabled and I have it still enabled.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Till, that was my question, so the Classic Onboard theme was only active initially and selecting Nightshade in preferences made it stick. Now it may be difficult to reproduce what happened, though.

Try this, exit Onboard and run
gsettings reset org.onboard schema-version

Then start it from terminal
onboard -dinfo

and if you see anything other than the Nightshade colors post the terminal output here.

@Franceso, yes I assumed Nightshade was the default theme now. I just installed from the PPA and couldn't reproduce the problem - got Nightshade.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

marmuta, now it appears in Nightshade.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Good to hear. The problem may still exist for others, though. Would you be able to try my suggestion in comment #7? Also, perhaps the output of
dconf dump /apps/onboard/

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I did exactly the steps of comment #7 when I wrote comment #8. Do you still need the output of

onboard -dinfo

even with the theme being correct with these steps?

dconf dump /apps/onboard/

Has no output at all for me, both with Onboard running or not running.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Sorry, I misunderstood. No, I don't need onboard -dinfo then.

So dconf migration isn't the cause, and gconf migration is gone from trunk anyway. "Follow system theme" was broken in the past, but is supposed to be fixed in your version.

One last try, what does this show:
gsettings list-recursively org.onboard|grep "[ -]theme"

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Here we go:

ill@till-saucy-stick:~$ gsettings list-recursively org.onboard|grep "[ -]theme"
org.onboard system-theme-associations {'Ambiance': '/usr/share/onboard/themes/Nightshade.theme', 'HighContrast': 'HighContrast', 'LowContrast': 'LowContrast', 'HighContrastInverse': 'HighContrastInverse', 'Default': ''}
org.onboard system-theme-tracking-enabled true
org.onboard theme '/usr/share/onboard/themes/Nightshade.theme'
till@till-saucy-stick:~$

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Thank you, that helped. The clue was 'Default': '' in system-theme-associations, which shouldn't have been empty.

What might have happened is that onboard-defaults.conf (system defaults) didn't exist the very first time you started Onboard. This wouldn't usually happen when it was installed via package manager, but might easily if you run from source.

Trunk has a likely fix now. The system default theme is always considered, not only on first start. This only stops once the theme was manually changed in preferences.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package onboard - 0.99.0-0ubuntu1

---------------
onboard (0.99.0-0ubuntu1) saucy; urgency=low

  * Request for sponsorship for new upstream release (LP: #1215164)
  * debian/control:
    - Add libcanberra-dev, libxkbfile-dev and libhunspell-dev to Build-Depends
    - Raise Standards-Version to 3.9.4
    - Remove python3-virtkey from Depends
    - Add libxkbfile1, libcanberra0, libhunspell-1.3-0 and iso-codes to Depends
    - Define new package onboard-data package for all architectures
    - Add onboard-data to Recommends
    - Update description of onboard package
  * debian/control_python2.in: removed
  * debian/control_python3.in: removed
  * debian/onboard.install: new file to split keyboard from the prediction data
  * debian/onboard-data.install: new file with the prediction data for onboard
  * debian/rules:
    - Remove support for python2
    - Add override_dh_auto_install target to use debian/tmp
    - Add override_dh_install target
  * debian/patches/add_defaults_for_ubuntu.patch:
    - Update add_defaults_for_ubuntu.patch with values for this release
  * Long press popup:
    - Hide long press popup when keyboard gets hidden
    - Add possibility to show arbitrary layouts in popups
    - Add character alternatives for most latin based languages
  * Add key-press feedback:
    - Size of label popup stored in gsettings-key
    - Also allow images in the touch feedback
    - Don't show feedback popup when xembedded
  * Add sound feedback:
    - New dependency: libcanberra
    - Add 'Play sound' option to the Preferences dialog
  * Add word suggestions:
    - Add tools to create language models (lm) from large corpora
    - Learn from typed text by default
    - Limit over-learning in the terminal with additional filters.
    - Use UTF-8 encoding internally (cuts memory usage)
    - Fall back to hard-coded country codes if there is no lm for current locale
    - Add initial system language models for: de_AT, de_CH, de_DE, en_AU,
      en_ES, en_GB, en_US, fr_fr, it_IT, pt_BR, pt_PT, ru_RU
    - Optimize system language models for size/memory usage.
    - Use case insensitive predictions most of the time
    - Offer spelling suggestions based on the hunspell C-API
    - Auto-add word separators
    - Add word suggestion row to all layouts
    - Make word suggestion also work when using the scanning mode
    - Doctests available for English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and
      Spanish
  * Add auto-capitalization
    - Off by default because very new
    - Add corresponding option to the Preferences of Onboard
    - Independent of word suggestions
  * Add XInput as a new event source and make it the default: (LP: #905636)
    - Fall back to GTK event handling if XInput 2.2 isn't available
    - Allow switching between GTK and XInput events without restarting Onboard
    - Listen only to the XInput client pointer and its slaves
    - Make XInput target specific windows instead of root window
    - Support Multi-touch
    - Don't count scroll-wheel movement as button presses
    - Grab pointer even if click is performed by different device than movement
    - Fix pointer becoming unresponsive on wetab...