~geb/dotool#4: Ubuntu permissions

Hello and thanks for another promising looking input tool.

I'm running dotool 1.5-0-g7c0a53ef94ac on Ubuntu 22.04.4 and I'm currently struggling with the following:

$ dotool
dotool: failed to create virtual keyboard device: could not open device file

I've done a fairly verbose form of the standard procedure:

cd dotool && ./build.sh && sudo build.sh install

cat /etc/udev/rules.d/80-dotool.rules
# This allows users in group input to use dotool without root permissions.
KERNEL=="uinput", GROUP="input", MODE="0660", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

sudo udevadm control --reload && sudo udevadm trigger

sudo usermod -aG input donjan
sudo reboot

And it doesn't let me, as per above. It works with sudo, but that's hardly practical for automation.

Am I missing something obvious?

I've even stooped to desperate measures such as this, to no avail:

sudo chown :input $(which dotool)
sudo chmod g+s $(which dotool)

(likewise, doing the same to dotoolc and dotoold is futile)

Status: RESOLVED CLOSED
Submitter: ~donjan
Assigned to: No-one
Submitted: 3 months ago
Updated: 3 months ago
Labels: No labels applied.

~geb 3 months ago

I'm not sure why the udev rule isn't working, being in the group (can check id -Gn for certainty) and rebooting should be enough normally.

It's the permissions of /dev/uinput which are the issue, and what the udev rule is supposed to set. Here's what I get running ls -l /dev/uinput:
crw-rw---- 1 john input 10, 223 Aug 10 11:08 /dev/uinput
You could chown/chmod /dev/uinput as a sad workaround, it would need to be done every reboot.

The udev rule could technically be being overridden by another udev rule, but that's never came up before. A systemd release last year broke its support for uinput udev rules, but the next release resolved it: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/79391

~donjan 3 months ago

That's the ticket. I was playing with other tools (ydotool etc.), and they apparently have conflicting udev rules. Almost the same, just with the additional step of manually creating a uinput group, so I'm not sure why it conflicts. But cleaning up and removing those makes dotool work.

Just for reference, my /dev/uinput is owned by root:
crw-rw---- 1 root input 10, 223 Aug 12 21:57 /dev/uinput
In any case, thank you for pointing me in the right direction!

~geb REPORTED CLOSED 3 months ago

Great! Thanks for reporting back with the solution!

kiasoc5 3 months ago · edit

Writing to say that on my Debian bookworm machine, upgrading systemd to version 254 from backports fixes the udev rule, as suggested by the Arch ticket.