Bugzilla Bug 195728

Recently x11-plugins/gkrellm-vaiobright quit working as user access/permissions
to /dev/sonypi seems to have been dropped.

Reference: Old Bugzilla Bug 54512

Reproducible: Always

Created an attachment (id=133345) [edit]
emerge info

The ebuild should install its own udev rules as needed.

is that the only app that can use sonypsi-device, or can it be used by other
stuff also?
If yes: is there another software that everytime is installed when sonypsi is
avail.

(In reply to comment #3)
> is that the only app that can use sonypsi-device, or can it be used by other
> stuff also?
> If yes: is there another software that everytime is installed when sonypsi is
> avail.

Perhaps app-laptop/spicctrl ?

I don't know - I don't actually have a vaio.

Can someone who does try installing spicctrl and see if it works, or if it
installs the proper udev modules?

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > is that the only app that can use sonypsi-device, or can it be used by other
> > stuff also?
> > If yes: is there another software that everytime is installed when sonypsi is
> > avail.
> 
> Perhaps app-laptop/spicctrl ?
> 
> I don't know - I don't actually have a vaio.
> 
> Can someone who does try installing spicctrl and see if it works, or if it
> installs the proper udev modules?
> 

I don't want to poo-poo this line of questioning, but it's a little off track
from the original request.  If you can just show me how to do a quick fix for
this I'll put it into an overlay until you have it all worked out.   I use an
external monitor 90% of the time.  This is one thing I really use as I'm trying
to stretch the life out of my laptop's built-in display.

Thanks.... 

As I've said, I don't have a Vaio, so I'm not sure what exactly what the device
user, group, and permissions used to be, or what they actually should be.

In the short term, you may want to just do the following, as root, on a running
system:

  chmod u+rw /dev/sonypsi

Then run this plugin again.  You should be able to use the device properly. If
that works and is the proper solution, create a file called
/etc/udev/rules.d/98-local.rules, and put in the following 2 lines:

# Adjusting permissions for sonypsi
KERNEL=="sonypsi", MODE="0666"

Of course, this will just make the file read/write by everyone, which
probably isn't safe on a multiuser box... not sure how many Sony Vaio's
are on a multi-user box.  Anyway, the more common Gentoo-like solution
is to create a group called "vaio" or "sony", then make the device node
owned by that group, and then just add any allowed users to that
group.  I'm not sure if there's already a sony vaio group, but it may
not be a bad idea to consider this.

Please let me know if the above works, or what the user, group, and permissions
on /dev/sonypsi used to be, so we can make it work.

I think I may have found the original udev rule for this.  Put this in your
98-local.rules instead:

# Sony Vaio Jogdial sonypi device
KERNEL=="sonypi",       NAME="%k", MODE="0666"

Sorry, not sure where I got the name "sonypsi" before.  Of course you'll also
want to 

  chmod 666 /dev/sonypi

on your running system instead of what I mentioned above.

That works, so I'm good now.  Thanks for your time and help.  

Sorry about pestering you. 

No trouble at all, and thanks for reporting this, there's no way I would have
known about it otherwise!

I still have to devise an actual solution (perhaps installing my own udev rule
as part of the ebuild, or depending on some other package that does), or at
least put a notice in the ebuild that tells people they need to do this
themselves.

Added this rule back to udev-116-r1.