"Permission denied" three times when trying to install RB to iPod Mini gen 1.

[grey38]

I tried asking this in the IRC but the server keeps D/Cing me. Sorry if this is the wrong forum.

I've used Rockbox on other devices before and I love it. Rockbox is really great. I came into possession of a iPod Mini generation 1 with a dead hard drive and like so many other people I went to replace it with CF card. I went onto my Manjaro since appimage works on Manjaro machine and downloaded the latest Rockbox and went install it. I tried to install and just an error popup that just said permission denied three times. Here is a screenshot.

https://files.catbox.moe/3b15sw.png

I didn't know what that meant but it offered to save a log file, so I looked at that. It gave like 300 lines of just details of my PC but the top has the actual logs, and it just said the same thing again.





*********************************************
***************  Logger   *******************
*********************************************
Could not open Ipod: permission denied
Could not open Ipod: permission denied
Could not open Ipod: permission denied

*********************************************
************  SYSTEMINFO  *******************
*********************************************



So this has never happened with Rockbox before. I could not find anything on the wiki about it. Do any of you happen to have any idea what is going on here? Rockbox has always worked really well before. I don't know what to do. Can someone help me, please?

Thank you for reading.

[bluebrother]

Bootloader installation requires direct access to the disk. Run with sudo for this part.

[grey38]

Okay, I googled how to run an appimage program as root and all of the results were forum threads saying "don't run appimage programs as root, never do that."
So uhh, ignoring those guys how do I run an appimage program, which rockbox is, as root?

[saratoga]

If you want to modify the disk on your device without root you're going to need to switch to an operating system that allows user privilege programs to modify the underlying disk hardware (just don't run any bad programs that modify the file system to give themselves root )

Does normal sudo not work?

[grey38]

I am sorry, I don't know. I wanted to try it and looked up how and only found out that you're not supposed to be able to launch .appimage programs from the terminal in the first place. Like this thread:

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-do-i-start-appimages-from-the-terminal-shortcut-in-usr-bin/145846/3

>The whole philosophy behind AppImages — as well as Snaps and FlatPaks — is that the applications in question would not be integrated with the rest of the system, and therefore, you cannot have your cake and eat it at the same time.

>If you want to open an AppImage from the command line, then you’re going to have to create a script that mounts the image and runs the executable contained in the image.


So I have no idea if sudo works because apparently with .appimage stuff you're not supposed to be able to open a terminal and do something like 'sudo rockboxtool.appimage' without coding your own launcher, which I don't know how to write.

[bluebrother]

Okay, I googled how to run an appimage program as root and all of the results were forum threads saying "don't run appimage programs as root, never do that."
So uhh, ignoring those guys how do I run an appimage program, which rockbox is, as root?

Well, generally don't run anything using sudo you don't trust. Actually, don't run anything you don't trust, but even more so with sudo.

That's generally not an appimage problem, and you can run an appimage with sudo. Though you have alternatives:

- mount the appimage, then run the binary contained. See the official documentation, not some random forum post: https://docs.appimage.org/user-guide/run-appimages.html
- use ipodpatcher and install the bootloader manually, then continue with the appimage but disable bootloader installation.
- make the device file for your player writeable for your user. If your user is named "blab" and the device if your ipod is "/dev/sdx" simply "chown :blab /dev/sdx*; chmod g+rw /dev/sdx*"

Or use Windows, which elevates RockboxUtility for everything (not exactly the best approach, but then you don't run into this issue.)

[fennectech]

Can’t we give rbutil the ability to ask for sudo?    Litteraly just “Visudo insertcommandhere”

[bluebrother]

Can’t we give rbutil the ability to ask for sudo?    Litteraly just “Visudo insertcommandhere”

Because you can't. An application cannot self-elevate. The proper solution here would be to run it as user, and run the parts requiring elevated permissions as separate process. On Linux this would be by running the process with pkexec, so the Desktop Environment can handle it as needed. For other OSes this works completely different, so we need to implement that for every OS separately. Plus, since that means running ipodpatcher / sansapatcher (those are the two parts that need elevation) as separate process we cannot access their output easily anymore (again, depends on the OS), so communicating with the subprocess needs some handling.

The problem itself is solvable, it just needs people willing to put in the work to (a) understand how to solve it and (b) do the work. I did some initial work on (a) some time back but never finished.