Re: [dev] GPL free Linux

From: Alessandro Pistocchi <apukfreelance_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:36:41 +0100

Sent from my iPhone

> On 12 Nov 2018, at 22:14, Michael Forney <mforney_AT_mforney.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2018-11-12, Markus Wichmann <nullplan_AT_gmx.net> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 11:17:49AM +0000, Alessandro Pistocchi wrote:
>>> I would use some help to make it work with X ( does it work with
>>> Wayland? ). There are not many docs I found about it...
>>
>> Ah, that old chestnut. As far as I know, the X input driver "evdev"
>> depends on the paths of the event devices being in /dev/input, and on
>> you having read access to them. I don't know if smdev puts them there by
>> default, nor how it sets the permissions on those files. Also, there's a
>> dependency on libudev in there somewhere. I don't know if that can pick
>> up files from smdev.
>
> I don't know about smdev, but if your /dev is a devtmpfs, the kernel
> will create those devices automatically with permissions 600
> root:root. I run a system without any hotplug daemon, just
> CONFIG_DEVTMPFS and CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT, and a script that runs at
> startup to set /dev/dri/* to 660 root:video and /dev/snd/* to 660
> root:audio.


Thanks. This will help :-)

>
>> The files should be named according to the links in /sys/class/input.
>> You should also be able to see the error messages in X11's log file.
>> That should tell you what's wrong. And if all else fails: strace.
>>
>> I have no experience with Wayland but I suppose it requires a similar
>> setup. Not having read permission on a device file is a showstopper no
>> matter the codebase.
>
> Usually how it works is either the display server itself needs to be
> setuid to open those input devices, or some other program (commonly
> systemd-logind) needs to open it on its behalf. I believe Xorg with
> systemd disabled will need to be setuid because of this.
>
> Wayland compositors work the same way. They either run setuid so they
> can open devices themselves, communicate with systemd-logind to get
> device FDs, or with some parent setuid "launcher" program which opens
> the devices for them. For swc, I went with the third approach.

What is swc?

>
> Regarding hotplugging and libudev, most wayland compositors use
> libinput to handle input devices, which uses libudev to detect when
> devices are added or removed. I believe libudev *does* work without
> udevd running (not completely sure). However, you can also just listen
> to netlink uevents to do the same thing. I maintain a branch of
> libinput that does exactly this:
> https://github.com/michaelforney/libinput/blob/master/src/netlink-seat.c

This is exactly what I wanted :-)

>
> Xorg seems to work similarly, and you might be able to avoid libudev
> and retain hotplug support by writing a "netlink" config backend here:
> https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/config
>

:-)

>>> I want to have a windowing system, compilers and libraries mainly.
>>> Also I need make and I would like to have flex and bison. Maybe a web
>>> browser and a graphical IDE for source code editing but I am not even
>>> sure about that.
>>
>> I was going to ask "Why not just use sta.li?" but that project
>> apparently doesn't exist anymore.
>>
>> And that is pretty much exactly what I want from a distribution as well,
>> and I just use Debian (you know you can just remove systemd from Debian,
>> right?)
>
> My own oasis project has all of those components and was inspired by
> sta.li, though avoiding GPL has not been a primary goal. It has some
> main components that are GPL including gcc, e2fsprogs, git, iproute2,
> kbd, fuse, and netsurf.
>

Where can I find oasis? Would you be interested in helping a bit if I needed help starting from oasis and removing gpl/lgpl stuff? I am ok with gpl apps but not with libs...
Received on Mon Nov 12 2018 - 22:36:41 CET

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