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 else is emitting it, possibly the shell. When I googled to try to figure out what, I found this big thread. The code ran fine under xfce, so there is likely some window-manager specific thing going on. I confirm that going root works around the problem. I think it would be annoying to force users to go root in environments where it's not necessary, so I'm going to document this as a known problem on the man page and give the workaround. The 1,8 release has been shipped. My apologies for not catching this sooner. It's not a program I use often. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to kbd in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1006676 Title: showkey fails with "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console" Status in kbd package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: When invoked in Gnome Terminal 3.0.1 (Ubuntu 11.10), showkey uninformatively exits after reporting: "Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console" For one who doesn't know what this means (such as myself), showkey is thus rendered unusable. The man page has no information about this behaviour. Installed kbd package: 1.15.2-3ubuntu1 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kbd/+bug/1006676/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
