Keyboard no longer works in Unity8 desktop session

[Christopher Townsend]

The keyboard no longer works in the Unity 8 desktop session. Looking at the ~/.cache/upstart/unity8.log, it looks as though the socket Unity 8 is trying to connect to does not exist. I see some of the following messages:

UbuntuKeyboardInfo - socket error: "QLocalSocket::connectToServer: Invalid name"

then the last message says:

Failed to connect to "/run/user/1001/ubuntu-keyboard-info" after 10 failed attempts

I looked in /run/user/1001 and did not see any file by that name.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

It's rather the other way around, can you check ~/.cache/upstart/maliit-server.log? The socket above is only there as a side channel for OSK to tell the shell its dimensions, so it's maliit that creates that socket, it must be unable to start for some reason.

[Christopher Townsend (townsend)]

Hi saviq,

There is no maliit-server.log in that path. I guess that means it's not getting started.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Indeed, not sure what would cause that, but there's nothing in unity8 that should have... With the converging of the two unity8 jobs maliit should start "on unity8 started", so should be fine there.

[Christopher Townsend (townsend)]

Doesn't seem maliit is installed on my system. I guess it's not a dependency for the Unity8 desktop??? I'll try installing it and see if it helps.

[Christopher Townsend (townsend)]

Oh, one other thing here. We are talking about the hardware keyboard, right?

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Lol, no. Maliit is the virtual keyboard...

If it's hardware keyboard that doesn't work for you, that's unrelated to maliit and we need to investigate between mir, qtmir and unity8.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Suspicious that Mir update 0.5.1 went out just before this bug was reported. And Mir 0.5.1 only contained one change:
https://code.launchpad.net/~andreas-pokorny/mir/fix-1346952/+merge/227993

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Andreas Pokorny (andreas-pokorny)]

Keyboard works for me within greeter and unity8-dash on the desktop. Keyboard on side stage does not work.

[Christopher Townsend (townsend)]

You're right, that's the behavior I see as well. I noticed this when I was trying to enter my U1 credentials in the Accounts settings.

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

This does seem to be specific to Systems Settings. Steps to recreate:

Open Notes app, create a new Note and enter some text.
Dismiss side stage
Open System Settings app & go to Accounts
Try and enter details for U1 or Facebook
Notice you can not type in to the input fields.

[kevin gunn (kgunn72)]

potentially the same as
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity8/+bug/1322116