June 2022 – Ryan Chapin's Website

There are instances when you need to run an X Window application. For me this is often running a terminator instance as root so that I can create tabs and split the window as still be root in each of those terminals.

In order for the root user to be able to connect to the X server you need to provide it with “credentials”. In this case it is on the same box and not over the network so the use of cookie authentication is acceptable.

As the user that is already authenticated to the X server run the following command to get the cookie used to connect to the the current $DISPLAY

rchapin@leviathan:~$ xauth list $DISPLAY
leviathan/unix:0  MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1  5fb2c0e68f4618ee4fa2202e1e4ae937

su to root and then run the following to add that cookie to roots authorization file

root@leviathan:~# xauth add leviathan/unix:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 5fb2c0e68f4618ee4fa2202e1e4ae937

You should now be able to run X windows applications from that root terminal.

I finally was able to get Visual Studio Code set-up correctly to run and debug unit and integration tests for a Python 3.8 project that I am working on (I’ll add a link to that post here once it is up).

After making some changes to the code and adding a test I got the following error when trying to debug the test:

Test result not found for: ./mylibs/integration_tests/myclient_integration_test.py::MyClientIntegrationTest::test_happy_path

? An odd error message, to be sure.

After a little while I figured out that when this happens it is ultimately the result of some syntax, interpretation error that occurs at runtime that the IDE may not flag as a problem for you.

Check the Output panel and click on the drop-down and select Python Test Log to see the stack trace of the error to see where you have a typo.

Month: June 2022

Running GUI apps locally as root in a non-root session

VS Code “Test result not found for:” When Running Tests for a Python Project [SOLVED]