When using my Laptop (Lenovo x220 tablet) in tablet mode, that is with the screen rotated, I have no access to the keyboard so I make use of kvkbd to type when needed. Unfortunately when the screen locks (e.g. after screen saver) I cannot make the virtual keyboard appear on the unlock screen to input my password. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use the laptop in tablet mode 2. Lock the screen manually or wait your screen saver to lock it. 3. Actual Results: There is no way to get the virtual keyboard to appear on the unlock screen making it impossible to input a password to unlock it. Expected Results: As with onboard virtual keyboard (default in Unity3D) the keyboard should be available on the unlock screen by default. Also on the KDM login screen the keyboard should be available.
openSUSE does this, on TabletPC hardware, but upstream the support has to be added to kdm as well as to the screen locker. I will reassign this wish to the screen locker, you can open a new request for kdm. I think using kvkbd might be wrong, though, we will probably use the plasma keyboard for this, as the locker is planned to be rewritten using QML.
Is anyway to get the OpenSUSE solution in Kubuntu just as a quick workaround? The plasma keyboard sounds a good idea but the current implementation is unusable on my machine. I enabled the plasma keyboard but it is always behind the active window I want to type on and clicking on the keyboard makes the window loose focus making it impossible to type. Also a plasma keyboard won't work on KDM would it?
I, somewhat, succeeded in getting an on-screen keyboard for the lock screen. However, this is a pretty crude hack right now. Essentially, I use Maliit and then manually call QT_IM_MODULE=Maliit /usr/libexec/kde4/kscreenlocker_greet There are many limitations right now but it works as a first proof of concept. One change that would make this approach very usable would be the possibility to add "exceptions" to kscreenlocker to allow the Maliit keyboard being shown in front of the lock screen. As far as I understand, it is a security feature that the lock screen is the top-most element and can (usually) not be covered by other elements. However, if there was a way to (securely) define exceptions to that, this problem could be solved pretty easily. I wrote more details about this in my blog: http://ruedigergad.com/2013/08/12/kde-lock-screen-vs-touch-input/
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 181554 ***