Using with sudo instead of a setuid binary

[colemickens]

On NixOS, it's impossible to have suid binaries in the store, we prefer to run such apps with sudo.

However this app doesn't support that. What would be required?

~/code/nixpkgs-wayland-- dev ⇡
❯ ./result/bin/wshowkeys
wshowkeys needs to be setuid to read input events

~/code/nixpkgs-wayland-- dev ⇡
❯ sudo !!                    
sudo ./result/bin/wshowkeys
devmgr: failed to drop root

~/code/nixpkgs-wayland-- dev ⇡
❯ 

[lorenzleutgeb]

Running into the same issue. Did you find any workaround or alternative to wshowkeys?

[schauveau]

Wayland applications can be run as root by abusing the fact that root can access all files and so the user's wayland socket. However, wshowkeys will still fail while trying to drop its 'setuid' status so the code need to be modified. Look in devmgr.c for the instruction that prints devmgr: failed to drop root and then comment out the next return 1; statement

Once this is done, you should be able to run wshowkeys as follow

sudo /bin/env WAYLAND_DISPLAY=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/user/run/0 ./build/wshowkeys

[JasonGantner]

Can you check if my PR (JasonGantner#5) works as expected for you?