Onboard keaboard moves (changes its position on screen) for no apparent reason

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius]

It just happens. Suddenly, without a reason, Onboard keaboard moves (changes its position on screen). Most of the times it moves into the upper left corner. It happens a few times a day. It is really annoying, when you have to drag the keabord back to where you want it to be.

I use Xubuntu 14.04, Xfce Desktop Environment Version 4.0

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

There is an option in the Preferences of Onboard to disable the keyboard automatic repositioning. You can find it by clicking on the settings button in the General section of the Onboard Preferences dialog.

Could you please tell us whether the problem persists if you set the Strategy popup of the Keyboard Movement option to None?

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Unfortunately, I was not able to find an option to disable the keyboard automatic repositioning. I was not able to find Strategy popup of the Keyboard Movement option as well.

I am attaching screenshots with all available options in Onboard Preferences dialog.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

It appears that I can add only one attachment per comment. So I will make some more comments.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#3

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#4

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#5

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#6

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#7

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#8

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#9

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#10

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

#11. The last one.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

You are right: the option I was talking about was according to your screenshots not available in the Preferences of the version of Onboard you are using. If you can update Onboard to the current release of Onboard available in our Stable PPA [1], the option I was talking about is located in the sub-dialog that opens by clicking on the Settings button shown in the General section of the Preferences of Onboard.

Otherwise, I can look with the dconf-editor at Onboard's setting keys of the version of Onboard shipping with the 14.04 release; the option might have been available in the gsettings of Onboard before it appeared in the Preferences dialog.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~onboard/+archive/ubuntu/stable

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Which one of these packages should I install?

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

You should install version 1.2.0 with trusty in its name; trusty is the name of the ubuntu 14.04 version and derivatives. If you add the PPA to your repository sources (for example by using the Software & Updates tool), the new Onboard version will be installed by doing the normal system update.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Thanks! Got the relevant version.
Found Strategy popup of the Keyboard Movement option. Set to None.
Still did not find an option to disable the keyboard automatic repositioning.

So far, the keybord did not move. If it does not move today and tomorrow, we can close this issue. I will keep you posted.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Setting the strategy to None does disable the auto-repositioning, but it also doesn't help us with understanding what actually went wrong. Perhaps keep that setting at "Only move when necessary" for a while and let us know if the new version does better.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Well, the keyboard already moved once today (strategy set to None).

[marmuta (marmuta)]

When it happens again, where exactly does it move to?
gsettings list-recursively org.onboard.window.landscape

I'm reminded of some similar problem where the dconf database was corrupted and whatever values Onboard wrote didn't stick. To test that you could create a new user account and run Onboard there.
Or make a backup of ~/.config/dconf/ and then delete all the files in there and restart. Preferences of all applications using gsettings will be reset though, including Onboard's.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

 gsettings list-recursively org.onboard.window.landscape

org.onboard.window.landscape dock-width 700
org.onboard.window.landscape width 448
org.onboard.window.landscape dock-expand false
org.onboard.window.landscape y 0
org.onboard.window.landscape dock-height 205
org.onboard.window.landscape height 134
org.onboard.window.landscape x 0

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

What are the other applications using gsettings?

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

Many applications use gsettings keys to store their settings. By installing the application dconf-editor, you will have the opportunity to look at the gsettings keys and even edit them. It is an alternative to using the gsettings command in the terminal.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Make a backup of ~/.config/dconf/. That way, if you feel you have lost too many of your preferences, you can get the old state back. If you haven't customized your system heavily, you might not notice much of a change, though.

Backup:
rsync -av ~/.config/dconf/ ~/.config/dconf_bak/

Delete:
rm ~/.config/dconf/*

Restore (only if necessary):
rsync -av ~/.config/dconf_bak/ ~/.config/dconf/

Best do any of this before login. On reboot, before you enter your password, switch to a terminal whith Ctrl+Alt+F1, login there and run the above commands. Don't forget the slashes "/" at the end, they are important. Ctrl+Alt+F7 and you're back.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

One more:

gsettings list-recursively org.onboard.window.landscape
org.onboard.window.landscape dock-width 700
org.onboard.window.landscape width 448
org.onboard.window.landscape dock-expand false
org.onboard.window.landscape y 583
org.onboard.window.landscape dock-height 205
org.onboard.window.landscape height 134
org.onboard.window.landscape x 953

[marmuta (marmuta)]

I missed that last post, sorry, Mantvydas, does #24 mean Onboard still moves on its own after you deleted the dconf database? It's not the left top corner of the screen at least, I suppose.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Yes, Onboard still occationally (2-3 times a day) moves on its own after I deleted the dconf database. Most of the times the left top corner, but sometimes other locations. I did not record all of the locations.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

I noticed that Onboard would get stuck at some temporary auto-show position when I accidentally clicked the resize frame. This fix should prevent that:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~onboard/onboard/trunk/revision/2165

There's a possibility this helps with part of this bug's issues, not with the movement to the top left corner, though. Still no good idea what would cause this and I haven't seen it happen here yet, unfortunately.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Still waiting for ideas...
Are there any other good on-screen keyboards for linux?

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Let's try one more time, then. Run in a terminal:
gsettings list-recursively org.onboard | grep -v snippets >onboard-gsettings.txt
and attach onboard-gsettings.txt here.

Then restart Onboard with logging enabled
killall onboard; onboard -ddebug 2>&1 | tee onboard-debug.log

Use it as you always do. Then when it moves somewhere you disagree with, make a note of the current time, including seconds, and add a quick description. Briefly describe what you expected it to do and what it did instead. Keep going, see if you can catch a few more occasions. Three will be plenty, although one may already be good enough.

Then attach onboard-debug.log here and post your notes with times. I'll then try to correlate any unusual activity with these times in the log.

> Are there any other good on-screen keyboards for Linux?
That wasn't necessary to bump the bug, but if you mean it, OTTOMH there's Gnome's keyboard based on Caribou, Maliit, Florence, kvkbd, matchbox, cellwriter, dasher, ... The choice is yours, pick what works best for you.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Thanks a lot for devoting your time to my problem!
Attaching onboard-gsettings.txt
debug.log in the next message.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

And now the debug.log and the times of the event:

11-Sep-2016
18:37:00

12-Sep-2016
10:32:35 {during this instance, onboard crashed as well as moving - the rectangle (window) became white and unactive, had to restart the program}
15:32:15
18:12:00
19:39:00
21:09:05 {these last instances occurred one after another - onboard moved, I dragged it back, it moved again, and again...}
21:09:37
21:09:45
21:10:18
21:10:40
21:11:02
21:11:30

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Today was fruitful :)
The times of the events (as always, the keyboard moves to the upper left corner. I also noticed that it hapens durin switching from one application to another):

9:41:00
11:44:44
11:45:18 - crash
11:46:08
11:46:26
11:46:44
11:48:11
11:48:38
11:49:20 - crash
11:50:04
11:51:39
13:20:20
13:57:50
14:00:05
14:03:34
14:14:12
14:15:45
14:19:26
14:37:39
17:47:03
17:47:50
17:54:37

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

The events for today and yesterday:

15-Sep-2016
9:22:34
17:28:18
17:37:25

16-Sep-2016
9:54:46
13:46:55
13:47:24 - crash
13:47:50 - crash
13:52:09
14:02:29
18:34:46

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Thank you, sorry for the delay.

There's not much overlap between the times you posted and the logs, unfortunately. The logs of #32 and #33 begin after the times you posted. Next time, if you have to restart onboard please use the -a switch for tee

killall onboard; onboard -ddebug 2>&1 | tee -a onboard-debug.log

to append to the existing file. I don't need any more logs at the moment, though.

Comment #31 has partial overlap, I've focused on 21:09:05: the log contains
21:09:01.327 DEBUG WindowUtils update_window_rect1: pos (0, 0), size (461, 136), origin (1, 24)

Top left position out of the blue, but the log doesn't explain why.
Let me try to replicate your environment as close as possible, I'm downloading Xubuntu 14.04. It'd be a lot easier to debug this locally.

Hopefully I can reproduce the crashes as well. Next time, when you get Onboard to crash please post any traceback you see the terminal. They look similar to this

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'test' is not defined

and ought to appear at the very end of Onboard's output.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Today, I saw it moving to 0,0 in Xubuntu 14.04 with your onboard preferences from #30. It's hard to catch, though, since it happens only sporadically and without obvious pattern. I'll try again another day.
I'm wondering if it still happens with "force window to top" enabled and/or window decoration disabled.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

Thanks again for your time!
I will try it with "force window to top" enabled and/or window decoration disabled for a few days and will report the results.

By the way, I noticed that the programs causing it to move most often are Mozilla Firefox and gedit.

[Mantvydas Juozapavicius (mantvius)]

I used on board with "force window to top" enabled for a few days. Both with window decoration enabled and disabled. The keyboard does not move now. But I get the opposite problem - if I move the keyboard intentionally, it moves back. Which one is worse?... I don't like neither.

One more thing I noticed. Usually, when closing onboard, it saves the preferences and next time opens the same as it was before closing. However, when "force window to top" is enabled, and I close onboard with window decoration on, next time I open it - the decoration is off. Should I register this as a separate bug, or this is the intended behavior?

[marmuta (marmuta)]

> if I move the keyboard intentionally, it moves back.
Thanks, that's very possible. Has happened before, but only with decoration enabled. It's hard to detect when dragging the window by the title bar has ended - that's when the position is saved. There is some heuristics in KbdWindow.py, but this has varying success on different types and versions of window managers.

> However, when "force window to top" is enabled, and I close onboard with
> window decoration on, next time I open it - the decoration is off.
Window decoration used to be unavailable when force-to-top is enabled. Window managers/Toolkits traditionally simply ignored the decoration toggle for override redirect windows. That's why the "Show window decoration" checkbox is disabled in preferences when f-t-t is enabled.

Decoration is actually supposed to disappear immediately when f-t-t is turned on, but this doesn't seem to happen here in Yakkety's Unity anymore either. I would have to check if certain environments now allow decoration or if this is just an unusable artefact of switching the window mode.

I'll see what I can do f-t-t and decoration in 14.04 Xfce. No need to file additional bug reports for now.