Kernel 6.12 available for testing

Hardware Librem 5
61

It’s complicated.

The bottom line is that by default a random user will not have access to the modem device - and so the program won’t work. Therefore you must take some action to get access.

One way is to add the user to a specific group. That comes with some security implications and probably isn’t best practice.

Another way is to run the specific command as another user (e.g. root) where the other user does have access to the device.

The Purism-supplied .desktop file will take the second approach and uses the pkexec command for that purpose but of course pkexec does not allow just any user to do just any thing as root.

Unfortunately, just when you thought you knew how to configure sudoers properly to get the right result from sudo, you will need to investigate polkit in order to get the right result from pkexec.

I can well imagine that if you are using your phone as some non-standard user something in the polkit configuration might not be allowing it.

When I do pkexec date (a deliberately undemanding command to execute) while logged in remotely as a user other than purism I get relatively incomprehensible errors but the bottom line is that authorisation fails and the command does not execute.

Are you accessing remotely or have you configured your phone to log in as a user other than purism or something else?

62

pkexec is used to get a GUI password prompt. You can just replace it with sudo and it will work. The important part is to point the app to the Wayland display socket, the same way you would have to do when launching any other GUI application via sudo or pkexec.

63

And @spacemanspiffy will probably need to examine the Purism-supplied .desktop file (/usr/share/applications/bm818-tool.desktop) to incant correctly.

Edit: Add

For example, on my phone purism is in use as the standard user (with uid 1000) but when logged in remotely as a different user, from the ssh session

sudo env WAYLAND_DISPLAY=/run/user/1000/wayland-0 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/0 /usr/bin/bm818-tool

does launch the application on the phone’s display (and, yes, I’ve cheated a bit with the display name).

64

Is this testing update being upstreamed? Just curious if it will show up on Mobian? I am running mobian forky. I’m not expecting to see this in mobian for sometime, I just wanted to ask. Thanks in advance!

65

And there’s my issue:

$ cat ~/.local/share/applications/bm818-tool.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.1
Type=Application
Name=BM818 tool
NoDisplay=true
Comment=Tool to manage the BM818 modem
Icon=/usr/share/bm818-tool/bm818-tool.svg
Exec=/usr/bin/bm818-tool
Actions=
Categories=X-GNOME-Other;

I must have added the NoDisplay=true long back on Byzantium and forgot about it. Since I had no desktop icon, I assumed the program needed to be launched from the terminal.

Glad it’s figured out, sorry to bug you with a non-issue :slight_smile:

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