Install Onboard keyboard in Fedora 23

If you are using a touchscreen on your Fedora workstation you should really check out project called Onboard. Its a replacement for the GNOME on-screen keyboard and its really great. I’m using Fedora 23 with GNOME on my Toshiba Encore WT8 Intel BayTrail tablet and I find that the Onboard keyboard is really much better than the default keyboard, mainly because it’s much easier to customize it and supports advanced stuff like function keys, different layouts etc.

Sadly Onboard keyboard is only packaged for Debian based systems so there isn’t a readily available repository for Fedora with it. However it’s not very difficult to get it installed in Fedora 23.

Get Onboard source from launchpad and unpack it #

cd
wget https://launchpad.net/onboard/1.1/1.1.2/+download/onboard-1.1.2.tar.gz
tar xvf onboard-1.1.2.tar.gz
cd onboard-1.1.2

*please check if there is a newer version available

Get dependencies #

sudo dnf -y install python3-distutils-extra dconf-devel \
libcanberra-devel libxkbfile-devel libXtst-devel hunspell-devel \
python3-devel intltool python3-dbus \
redhat-rpm-config gcc make gcc-c++

Install Onboard #

sudo ./setup.py install

Fix schemas #

sudo cp data/org.onboard.gschema.xml /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/
sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

Launch onboard #

You can launch Onboard from the terminal by typing:

onboard

or by finding it in your application launcher.

Thats it really, have a great day and go Fedora!