Gnome Display Manager (gdm) and XTEST
Gnome Display Manager (gdm) and XTEST
Hi, I've recently discovered that steam client on linux requires the XTEST extension to handle input from controller. However, I can not enable XTEST on gdm no matter what I've done. Switch to lightdm solves it instanly but I prefer gdm.
Could you provide some hint how to debug it and have you experienced that before? Thank you very much!
I am using Arch Linux with Gnome and Wayland.
I have never heard about this, can you link to your source for this? Also what's the symptom here exactly?
AFAIK steam and games directly use the kernel devices for controller input, not any X11 extensions.
Edit: Wait!? Do you want to use the controller as keyboard + mouse? Inside of GDM? Because that might use XTEST after reading about it, since XTEST seems to be some kind of testing protocol that allows one to emulate a mouse.
No steam uses XTEST under the hood for controller. You can see a bug report here. You could try to disable the XTEST extensions and the steam client will crash if you connect with a controller.
For the symptom, If I do a
xdpyinfoit will print a list of enabled extensions and no matter what i've tried it does not have the XTEST extension.Interesting. I will say I suspect still this is to make the controller act as a mouse or keyboard somehow, which steam can do.
One interesting thing is that it says in the bug report, that steam also requires uinput, which is used to create virtual input devices from userspace. And maybe (speculating) you need that for XTEST to work on wayland or something, or maybe steam can use uinput instead of XTEST if it's not available.
Or maybe it's security-related somehow (Regular programs being able to create virtual keyboards is kind of a security issue).
For me the output of
getfacl /dev/uinputwill list my username with read/write permissions. I have no idea what is responsible for giving me this permission but there it is.Can you check with getfacl in both sessions?