Sunday, October 12, 2014

On screen virtual keyboard on Lubuntu

On screen virtual keyboard on Lubuntu

If your keyboard is broken and you are working on windows operating system, you can use virtual keyboard, but what about linux?? does linux have virtual keyboard like on windows?

I don't know about other distro, but on lubuntu/ubuntu we can use virtual keyboard called "onboard". Onboard have more customization options than virtual keyboard on windows.

Onboard is not available by default on lubuntu system, so you need to install it first using apt-get install command, like this:
sudo apt-get install onboard
It should be like this:
sudo apt-get install onboard
[sudo] password for kernelpanic: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 gir1.2-atspi-2.0 onboard-data python3-cairo
  python3-gi python3-gi-cairo
Suggested packages:
  mousetweaks
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 gir1.2-atspi-2.0 onboard onboard-data python3-cairo
  python3-gi-cairo
The following packages will be upgraded:
  python3-gi
1 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 270 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,200 kB of archives.
After this operation, 22.1 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y

Once installed, onboard will be available from the lubuntu start menu > Universal Access > Onboard, you can also open the program from the console, just type onboard and it will popup on your screen.

Here's what onboard look like:

On screen virtual keyboard on Lubuntu

To drag the virtual keyboard press and hold the cross sign (it's below the close button, next to the arrow cursor) using your mouse.

Like i said, onboard is fully customizable, you can change the size, set theme, choose layout, etc. You can find these options from the onboard applet near the clock applet on the lubuntu status bar.

That's it, have fun with onboard virtual keyboard :)

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