Hi, I've recently switched to KDE 5.8.4 (Fedora 25) on my Surface Pro 3, which is a tablet with a touchscreen. Am struggling to find the out of the box/native virtual keyboard (onscreen keyboard).

I've also tried Arch linux (also KDE 5.8.4), and in both cases I can't find anyway to launch the default onscreen keyboard.

There's little online info I can find, apart from this from a KDE developer:
viewtopic.php?f=285&t=132692&p=359098&hilit=virtual+keyboard#p359098

And the fact that the plasmaboard applet in the kdeplasma-addons package is no longer built by default:
https://github.com/KDE/kdeplasma-addons ... eLists.txt

There's also a /usr/share/kwin/virtualkeyboard directory installed by the kwin-common package on Fedora 25, and the following two from the qt5-qtvirtualkeyboard package:
/usr/lib64/qt5/plugins/platforminputcontexts/libqtvirtualkeyboardplugin.so
/usr/lib64/qt5/qml/QtQuick/VirtualKeyboard/Styles/libqtvirtualkeyboardstylesplugin.so

I'm aware of third party keyboards, such as onboard, kvkbd, etc, but they really don't compare to having an automatic keyboard popup everytime a text box etc is clicked on/activated (not to mention, one that allow login!)

Any help would be much appreciated - should I be building plasmaboard from source? Or is this currently in development?

I tried booting with my keyboard disconnected - no luck - SDDM didn't display a keyboard...

Many thanks,

Andrew

You need to install Qt's qtvirtualkeyboard itself. The files installed by kwin are not enough.
I don't know whether Fedora offers a package, but you can download the source code at Qt's home page.

Then an icon should appear in the system tray with which you can enable/disable the virtual keyboard.
(will currently only work in Wayland though)

And sddm will not display a virtualkeyboard by default, you need to add the option InputMethod=qtvirtualkeyboard to /etc/sddm.conf according to "man sddm.conf" (but I haven't tried that myself yet).

PS: plasmaboard is a KDE4 applet and has never been ported, so you cannot build it for Plasma5. It's deprecated/superseeded by kwin's qtvirtualkeyboard support.

wolfi323 wrote:You need to install Qt's qtvirtualkeyboard itself. The files installed by kwin are not enough.
I don't know whether Fedora offers a package, but you can download the source code at Qt's home page.

Apparently they do, the package is called qt5-qtvirtualkeyboard:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/p ... lkeyboard/

Install this, and the virtual keyboard should be available (if you login to a Plasma5 Wayland session).

Wow, many thanks for the quick replies wolfi!

Got it working (albeit, fedora 25 has an issue starting a Plasma wayland session from gdm/probably others, but I got it starting with the startplasmacompositor command).
Couldn't seem to get the keyboard to popup in Konqueror, Firefox, or Chrome's url/search bars however - one of the key places I'd love to use it.

Alas, on wayland the surface touchpad touch to tap can't be configured, and there are issues with the surface pen, so I might have to wait a release or two...

Thanks again, Andrew

andrewrembrandt wrote:Couldn't seem to get the keyboard to popup in Konqueror, Firefox, or Chrome's url/search bars however - one of the key places I'd love to use it.

Yes, I noticed myself that it didn't work in Firefox when I tried it (didn't try Chrome).

But it definitely does in Qt5 applications, so should work in Konqueror 16.12.0 (I'm not sure about KDE4 applications at the moment...).

Alas, on wayland the surface touchpad touch to tap can't be configured, and there are issues with the surface pen, so I might have to wait a release or two...

A new touchpad KCM (especially for Wayland) is currently in the works:
https://phabricator.kde.org/D3617

Looks quite finished already, but I don't know when (and to which version) it will be added.