GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 412533
Problems running GOK in GDM
Last modified: 2011-10-14 10:58:30 UTC
I notice two problems running GOK in the GDM login program. 1) When I navigate the menus in gdmlogin, the GOK window changes to "menu navigate mode" which works okay aside from the fact that the GOK window jumps around the screen. This looks ugly, and would look better if GOK stayed attached to the top. Aside from looking bad, it also can cause the following usability issue: If you play with moving around the menus enough, you'll notice that GOK slowly moves down the screen. Eventually it obscures the login screen and you can't see what you are doing anymore. I think there should be some mechanism to lock GOK to the top of the screen so it doesn't move like this in --login mode. This could be a problem with the way STRUTS is implemented in the gdmlogin window manager. Perhaps it needs additional code to work with GOK here. If so, please file a bug against the gdm module and explain what is missing. 2) When I run GOK from gdmgreeter it doesn't work at all. It doesn't insert characters into the entry when you click on the letters in GOK. I suspect this is probably because gdmgreeter runs without a window manager and GOK isn't sending the output to the right place? Perhaps GOK could be enhanced to do something more sensible when running in --login mode, like perhaps send the text to the root window if there is no screen manager running? Note that the entry field always has focus in gdmgreeter so just sending the text to the root window would probably work, though I haven't tested it.
3) A third issue I discovered, similar to #2 above. When I start GOK in GDM, and then go into the Failsafe Session, then GOK doesn't allow me to type into the terminal window. Note you pick the "Failsafe Session" in the menu choice for choosing sessions. Failsafe is normally used by users who have problems logging into their session (like perhaps a problem with their $HOME/.profile or an environment variable problem). Logging into failsafe allows them to fix the problem. GOK not working in Failsafe means that users cannot fix such problems and could be unable to get their system working. It's probably best to look into this #3 problem using gdmlogin and not gdmgreeter since gdmgreeter has lots of a11y problems. I suspect this is related to #2 because there is no window manager running at this time, and GOK is probably not handling this situation well. It should probably have some code to try to figure out what window to insert characters into when there is no window manager to indicate which window has focus. In the gdmgreeter case and this case, there is only one window open, so in both cases GOK should probably just have some smarts to know if there is no window manager but one window open, then it should insert characters into that window. If it is necessary to modify GDM to add hints or Xatoms or whatnot to help GOK identify where to insert characters, please file a bug in the gdm category and I'll be happy to help make changes to GDM to make this work. I'd say this is important to look into. I'm surprised I filed this bug over a month ago and it seems to have not generated even a comment.
Brian, Thanks for the bug report. Regarding: #1, I agree that GOK should stick to the edge. I haven't begun to diagnose what is happening. #2, I think this might be a good plan; to enhance login mode. We need to find out the root cause of the failure to insert characters first. #3, Ditto. I wonder how focus works in a window-manager-less environment.
*** Bug 530663 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 542453 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
gok (GNOME on-screen keyboard) development has been stalled and it has been replaced by caribou [1]. Maintainers don't have future development plan so i am closing all the bugs as WONTFIX. [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-bugsquad/2011-October/msg00001.html