Problem with appimage accessing a USB port

Aurora
1

Hi All,

Installed Aurora a couple of days ago, as I’ve been keen to have a crack at an immutable distro for a while. All working well until I ran into a problem with Saleae’s Logic Analyser 2. It’s only available as an appimage. After much mucking around and searching I finally got it to install, however it needs to access a device plugged into a USB port. Normally (on other distros) it automatically finds the port and opens it. On Aurora however it just pops up a message saying “Error connecting to port”. I’m assuming this is to do with the program not automatically being granted access to critical bits of the OS, as it’s an appimage and the OS is immutable.

So my question is, how to I allow Logic Analyser to access a USB port?

All advice gratefully received. :slight_smile:

Edit: have the same problem with two other apps too; VS Code (to program microcontrollers connected via USB), and EdgeTX to program R/C model transmitters (also via USB). Thanks.

2

Nice to see a hardware geek around these parts :slightly_smiling_face:

There are a couple of things mentioned on their website that you could try, if you haven’t already:
——

Issues with Running the AppImage File

Starting Ubuntu 24.04, you may need to run our app with the --no-sandbox argument like so. Otherwise, the app may fail to launch.

./Logic-2.x.xx-master.AppImage --no-sandbox

In other error cases (not common), you can attempt to extract the Logic binary from the AppImage file with the following command.

./Logic-2.x.xx-master.AppImage --appimage-extract

This will dump the contents to a new directory called squashfs. You can then try to run the Logic binary directly from there.
——

from here

3

Just saw this.
For VSCode, are you using the -dx variant of Aurora, with VSCode built in? That would work better than a flatpak, if that’s what you’re trying to use.

Not sure about EdgeTX, but perhaps knowledge gained from working on the other two will help.

4

@JohnAtl thanks for the replies.

Adding --no-sandbox didn’t help unfortunately, but it did throw up an interesting error. No idea what it means, but maybe I need to correct it?

ATTENTION: Sandboxing of this app has been disabled since the user namespace feature of your OS is disabled.
Please enable user namespaces or use the deb package.

Good idea about using the dx version, but I suspect it will still not allow access to USB ports, as vscode is mainly about developing proper apps, not fiddling around with stuff that needs to talk to other devices plugged into USB. There are plugins that do it (PlatformIO and MicroPro f’rinstance) but I’m assuming it’s the plugin that talks to the USB port.

But vscode is actually not my preferred weapon, that would be Pycharm, which I suspect will have the same problem, as Micropython is again handled by a plugin (which is still a bit alpha I have to say). Or the old standby, Thonny. Always works but has a really basic editor, and some other quirks. It has a problem with users and groups, and I’ve posted a separate query about that.

Live and learn,

:wink:

5

Managed to add the Saleae Logic rules to /etc/udev/rules.d, restarted the PC, but still get the same error.

Tried the Arduino IDE as well, but it couldn’t upload to a microcontroller either, even with the udev rules, so it doesn’t seem to be a udev problem.

No idea what to try next…

:-\

6

Just for fun I installed Sigrok Pulseview, which does the same thing as Saleae Logic Analyser, but is a foss tool. Not as sophisticates as the Saleae tool, but incredibly it works, whereas the Saleae tool doesn’t. At least I can’t get it to work.

Pulseview is also an appimage, so I don’t know why it can talk to a usb port and Saleae LA can’t. So, clearly not Aurora’s problem. It must be something to do with the tool itself. Thonny couldn’t talk to a device plugged into a usb port until the user was a member of a particular group. Maybe Saleae has the same requirement?

:wink:

2 Likes