Touchy or Gscreen will not open on Ubuntu 18 with Prempt Kernel

One of our machines has an industrial keyboard that is not recognized by Ubuntu 12 or Wheezy. It is recognized by Ubuntu 18. I installed Ubuntu 18, built and installed a kernel, (4.13.13-rt5 #1 SMP PREEMPT RT). The keyboard works. I installed Linuxcnc 2.9. (I wish I would have chosen 2.7.) Axis opens fine, but not touchy or gscreen. Here is the debug file info: Gtk Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module" I installed libglade and now I don't get the same error message, but touchy still doesn't start. I'm wondering if I should start over with Lbuntu or Mint19 and follow JT's recipe? Can I simply delete my Linuxcnc-dev directory and start from installing Linuxcnc again on Ubuntu 18?

You might be a bit stuck here, where you need a new Linux to drive the keyboard, and an old one to have the Python and GTK versions that LinuxCNC is currently stuck with.

We need a big effort to move to Py3 and away from PyGTK (etc) but I think that will have to be after 2.8 is released. It's a big re-write.

Without an error message it's hard to say for sure.
But if it's gtk2 related (sounds like it) you could try to use a package from an older distribution.
Linuxcnc has been doing this for awhile for the GLADE editor.

Chris