Lightweight OSK to use with Chromium autostart

General Discussion
1

Hi, new user here. I’ll start by saying that I really like the way DietPi is setup.

Currently, I’m looking at setting up an industrial kiosk with DietPi, RPi4/5, and a touchscreen monitor. In my testing, DietPi is much more responsive than Raspbian Lite + Ubuntu-Frame + wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk + ubuntu-frame-osk.

I’ve setup DietPi to auto start chromium full-screen etc. via custom script which also fires up onboard on-screen keyboard. It all works fine, but I can’t auto show the OSK because a lack of a gnome.

I’m a noob with gnome/LXDE type stuff. What is the lightest way get an OSK that will auto show?

2

I tried really hard not to install LXDE and still get auto show to work, but no dice. At least I have two options.

  1. install lxde which is lightweight and get auto-show with the OSK
  2. Use Chromium autostart only and manually pull up the OSK when needed

There maybe a better way to handle this, but for now this works in a custom script autostart


#!/bin/bash
# DietPi-AutoStart custom script
# Location: /var/lib/dietpi/dietpi-autostart/custom.sh
export DISPLAY=:0

# Run built-in Chromium autostart script
/var/lib/dietpi/dietpi-software/installed/chromium-autostart.sh &

# Let chromium spin up
sleep 15

# Start LXDE session
startlxde &

# wait for LXDE to initialize
sleep 5

# Hide LXPanel
pkill lxpanel || true

# Start OSK
onboard &

exit 0
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