Home / server / Questions / 1134307
Accepted
EK0
Asked: 2023-06-20 09:33:51 +0800 CST

Rocky Linux 9 touch screen disable on-screen keyboard

  • 772

I need to run an application on X11 in Rocky Linux 9.2, on a machine that uses a touchscreen monitor in addition to a mouse and physical keyboard.

When I launch the application by touching its icon, the application window comes up together with the on-screen keyboard. The application window shifts up to make room for the keyboard. The user must dismiss the keyboard to make the window move down into the screen (otherwise, the application cannot be used as a large portion of the window moves above the edge of the screen).

Besides the minor annoyance of having to dismiss the on-screen keyboard, sometimes the window comes up in a shifted state, leaving room for the keyboard, but the keyboard does not appear. In that case, there is no keyboard to dismiss, and the window cannot be moved down without knowing the special keyboard shortcut to move the window when its title bar is not visible. This makes the application very inconvenient to use, especially since it is intended for non-technical users.

I have seen various posts showing how to configure GNOME using a browser extension and a connector to disable Caribou, the on-screen keyboard application, but apparently, the extension or the connector is no longer compatible with the version of the GNOME shell that comes with Rocky Linux (version 40.4.0).

Apparently, Caribou shows up even when the Settings > Accessibility configuration indicates that the on-screen keyboard should be disabled. By the way, the on-screen keyboard does not seem to appear at all when running Wayland instead of X11, but the application unfortunately is not compatible with Wayland.

Can anyone tell me what the correct way to get rid of the on-screen keyboard with the latest version of GNOME on Rocky Linux/X11?

x11

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is really an issue with recent GNOME shell versions, not exclusive to Rocky Linux.

    I found an answer by kylebakerio on the Pop!_OS list of issues on GitHub, which gives clear, step-by-step instructions for manually installing the Block Caribou GNOME extension on GNOME shell version 40 (the extension is for 3.26, so it can't be installed as is). Pop!_OS, by the way, is a variant of Ubuntu.

    This sure doesn't feel like the "correct" way to solve the problem, but without it, the system is pretty much unusable. I reproduce kylebakerio's instructions with a few clarifications here:

    1. Go to the extension page and select a shell version, then select an extension version (it does not matter which, as you'll overwrite all the version information later)
    2. Unzip the downloaded file and rename the extracted folder to [email protected]
    3. Overwrite the contents of the file metadata.json inside that folder with this:
    {
"_generated": "Generated by SweetTooth, do not edit",
"description": "Blocks caribou (the on screen keyboard) from popping up when you use a touchscreen. Even if it's disabled in the accessibility services menu. Continuation of keringar's work. Tested on GNOME Shell version 3.36 - 41 on Fedora 32 - 35. For a higher version see https://github.com/lxylxy123456/cariboublocker#installing-on-high-gnome-shell-version .",
"name": "Block Caribou 36",
"shell-version": [
"40",
"41",
"42"
],
"url": "https://github.com/lxylxy123456/cariboublocker",
"uuid": "[email protected]",
"version": 4
}
    1. Move the folder into ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions (create the folder if it does not exist)
    2. Press Alt-F2 and run r to reload GNOME
    3. Run the Extensions app (open the launcher and type "Extensions"), and enable the Block Caribou extension you just installed. You will have to log out and log back in for it to take effect.

    I can confirm that this works perfectly with GNOME 40.4. The hope is that this will continue to work for GNOME shell versions up to 42. Maybe eventually the GNOME project will publish an extension for more recent versions.

    • 0