New 2025-07-09

New Release: Myrlyn-0.9.7

Several Fixes about `sudo` and Wayland

I hope that's it for the tinkering with sudo and environment variables for better Wayland support.

Details

On some setups, Myrlyn couldn't be started with root permissions. After extensive research it turned out that at least one environment variable was missing to be preserved in the myrlyn-sudo script: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR was also needed; or preserving the complete environment (which sudo actively prevents) with sudo -E.

But in some scenarios, there were errors that the current user did not have permissions (by a rule in the sudo setup) to preserve the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable, in others that the user didn't have permissions to preserve the whole environment with sudo -E.

It took a while, but now the myrlyn-sudo script builds its own environment with the /usr/bin/env command where it gets the values from command line arguments; something like

sudo /usr/bin/env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR  myrlyn

The big difference is that this $DISPLAY is already expanded in the script, so what sudo receives is something like

sudo /usr/bin/env DISPLAY=:0.0 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/home/kilroy/foo  myrlyn

i.e. sudo can delete the environment (and thus sabotage us) for the part running with root permissions all it wants; the env command (already running as root) builds a new one from its command line arguments and then starts myrlyn, also with root permissions.

I found this use of the env command in several Stack Overflow / Super User articles, but it was never explained what on earth it actually does, so here you have the explanation.

I hope this finally puts an end to all the tinkering with the sudo environment. This should work with any sudo setup, no matter if it's the one from the distro in /usr/etc/sudoers, /usr/etc/sudo.d/ or your custom one in /etc/sudoers or /etc/sudoers.d/.

In addition to that, sudo is now no longer called with -i, i.e. the shell that it starts is no longer a login shell which executes more init scripts. This might make a difference.

All those changes now makes Myrlyn now no longer force using XWayland, but a plain Wayland session; so you don't need XWayland installed for Myrlyn anymore.

Clarification about Myrlyn Widget Theme and Fonts when Running as Root

Several users had questions why Myrlyn didn't use their dark theme or the font sizes they configured for their desktop. The answer is simple when you think about it: It runs as root, so you have to make sure the desktop environment for root contains those customizations.

You can simply log into a graphical session as root once and change those settings there. If you didn't assign a root password, you could simply assign one for a short while, log in as root, customize, log out again, and remove the root password again (sudo passwd -d root).

Fixed Searching for -devel Packages

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[Doc] Myrlyn News and Development Status #1

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Myrlyn News and Development Status

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