[Touch-packages] [Bug 1006676] Re: showkey fails with "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console"

2017-08-22 Thread redtux
Hi there, I also just had the same problem on an Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS box (with both zsh and bash, on tty and on pseudo terminal running X). Is it already known where this error message comes from, so we could change the string to something more convenient recommending the user to become root or to

[Touch-packages] [Bug 1006676] Re: showkey fails with "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console"

2017-01-26 Thread Eric S. Raymond
I am the author of showkey. I only just became aware of this bug myself, by trying to run showkey in the terminal emulator under i3. The curious thing about it is that "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console" does not occur as a string in the program source. I think something el

[Touch-packages] [Bug 1006676] Re: showkey fails with "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console"

2016-09-17 Thread Sondra Kinsey
I agree that a more helpful error message would be helpful here. I am an experience Ubuntu terminal user. However, it is not intuitive to me that showkey should require root privileges. I would not have guessed this as a solution to resolve this error. A new error message could take several forms: