Bugzilla – Bug 1226807
minicom cannot run as user due to /run/lock permissions
Last modified: 2024-07-01 06:35:33 UTC
When running minicom as a user in the dialout group I now get an error message that it cannot create a lock file. This worked in 15.5. Minicom is attempting to create the lockfile in /run/lock but only root has write access to this directory. Minicom uses lockdev which requires access to /var/lock. One way to fix this is to build minicom without lockdev. Lockdev is fundamentally broken because it requires write access to /run/lock, which is a security nightmare. When minicom is built without lockdev the location of the lockfiles can be specified to be someplace other than /var/lock. See https://systemd-devel.freedesktop.narkive.com/vCJLfMo2/headsup-var-lock-and-var-lock-lockdev for a discussion. As an interim solution, I added an ACL to allow the dialout group to write to /run/lock, though this is far from ideal.