How to enable onboard in mate lock screen greeter?

Support & Help Requests
1

Would someone kindly explain how to enable the onboard keyboard in the mate lock screen greeter? I have onboard working in the login screen when I log in but then when I lock the screen , I get a password prompt and no keyboard ><
Help ><

2

Can someone at least reveal the ultra-secret location of the config file for the lock screen greeter? I can probably figure it out for myself if I just had the location. I promise to try my best to reveal my results.

Thanks.

3

simply click “change user” button and you will see the same screen as when you log in, there you can turn on the onboard. Have just checked it out on UM 17.10.

4

Excellent suggestion, I discovered the same thing. After some in depth searching I don’t believe an on screen keyboard is possible at this time on the screen saver lock screen, but I tested the “Switch User” button on my 17.10 install and it is a good work around. It works just fine even though I only have the one user on this machine.

1 Like
5

Have you (anyone) tried: Alt + Super + s ???. :smiley:

6

Actually, nice workaround but if I wanted to run a script at the lock screen, I would need to use Systemd right?

7

(Edited 2024-10-24, the morning after, because I shouldn't work so late at night, when I start making unwarranted conclusions.)

I know this is six years + later, but I've been struggling with the same issue. The workaround of clicking the Change User button works on my Intel NUC desktop computer, but not on my Lenovo laptop. The workaround takes me to the login screen, where I can use the greeter's on-screen keyboard to enter my password, but when I press Enter it returns to the lock screen instead of unlocking my session.

So I started digging around, and I found the solution. The settings that enable Onboard to be displayed in the lock screen are held in the mate-screensaver schema in GSettings. If you issue these two commands in a terminal window, you should see the default values shown below:

 gsettings get org.mate.screensaver embedded-keyboard-enabled
 false

 gsettings get org.mate.screensaver embedded-keyboard-command
 ''

One might think that checking the option to "Show when unlocking the screen" on the General tab of Onboard Preferences would configure these settings correctly, but it doesn't change them at all. Here are the necessary settings to enable Onboard to appear on the lock screen:

 gsettings set org.mate.screensaver embedded-keyboard-enabled 'true'

 gsettings set org.mate.screensaver embedded-keyboard-command 'onboard -e'

The -e option is essential. It causes Onboard to print the XID of its window to STDOUT when it is launched. I conjecture that the mate-screensaver needs this XID so it can raise Onboard's window above the full-screen lock window that hides everything on the desktop, thus making the on-screen keyboard visible and usable.

Using the plain command 'onboard' doesn't print that XID, with the result that mate-screensaver cannot display the on-screen keyboard on the lock screen.

A further note: I looked carefully, and I don't see these settings exposed in the mate-screensaver-preferences GUI. They are hidden deep in the mate-screensaver schema in the Gsettings database, where they can only be tweaked using the command line or the dconf-editor GUI, so it's understandable that users have been unsuccessful in getting this to work.

(BTW: Shouldn't the word "greeter" be removed from this topic's title? I believe that word refers to the program that implements the login screen, whereas the lock screen is implemented by the DE's screensaver. Also, I don't see any tags applied to this topic. If an admin could add some that would help others to find this information.)