RedNotebook not starting with Flatpak

[OlegOgivov]

Describe the bug
I've been using RedNotebook for years, but today it's not starting when clicking on the Gnome launcher
I've been able to workaround it by launching it from the command line:
$ flatpak --socket=session-bus run app.rednotebook.RedNotebook
This is not ideal though

To Reproduce

1. Go to Gnome Applications launcher
2. Click on 'RedNotebook'
3. See error on /var/log/messages:
   Nov 18 11:49:41 oleg-x40 app.rednotebook.RedNotebook.desktop[10232]: Failed to register: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown

Expected behavior
RedNotebook working

Versions:

• RedNotebook version 2.27
• Operating system and version: Linux oleg-x40 4.18.0-425.3.1.el8.x86_64 Reformatted README for Github markdown #1 SMP Tue Nov 8 14:16:25 PST 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Log output when reproducing bug

2022-11-18 12:05:56,566 INFO Writing log to file "/home/oleg/.rednotebook/rednotebook.log"
2022-11-18 12:05:56,566 INFO System encoding: utf-8
2022-11-18 12:05:56,566 INFO Language code: en_US
2022-11-18 12:05:56,576 INFO Spell checking languages: ['en_AU', 'en_BS', 'en_BZ', 'en_CA', 'en_GB', 'en_GH', 'en_IE', 'en_IN', 'en_JM', 'en_MW', 'en_NA', 'en_NZ', 'en_PH', 'en_TT', 'en_US', 'en_ZA', 'en_ZW']
2022-11-18 12:05:56,577 INFO Spell checking dictionaries: [('en_AU', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_BS', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_BZ', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_CA', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_GB', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_GH', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_IE', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_IN', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_JM', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_MW', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_NA', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_NZ', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_PH', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_TT', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_US', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_ZA', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>), ('en_ZW', <Enchant: Hunspell Provider>)]
2022-11-18 12:05:56,645 INFO Using LibYAML
2022-11-18 12:05:56,646 INFO Connected Signals: [<Signals.SIGHUP: 1>, <Signals.SIGINT: 2>, <Signals.SIGQUIT: 3>, <Signals.SIGABRT: 6>, <Signals.SIGTERM: 15>, <Signals.SIGTSTP: 20>]
2022-11-18 12:05:56,647 INFO Peak memory: 134576324 KiB

[takluyver]

I see the same, and after a bit of fiddling around, I can get it to work with a more specifc option:

flatpak run --own-name=app.rednotebook app.rednotebook.RedNotebook

That is, giving it permission to claim the name app.rednotebook on the session bus (whereas --socket=session-bus gives it full access to the D-Bus session bus).

I see that name app.rednotebook is set in some code that was added by PR #478:

https://github.com/jendrikseipp/rednotebook/blame/9f502ee75bfc13a3da07cf0b543710925026e2f2/rednotebook/journal.py#L200

I think that Flatpak expects the name the application claims to match the ID it's installed under (i.e. app.rednotebook.RedNotebook). If I find the relevant file and edit the line above to use this as the application_id, then it works with no extra permissions. So it seems to be the mismatch between app.rednotebook and app.rednotebook.RedNotebook that causes the issue.

[jendrikseipp]

Thanks! I just pushed a fix.

[takluyver]

Thanks!

[takluyver]

Just to note for anyone else affected by this: besides the command-line workarounds which @OlegOgivov and I posted above, you can also work around it by using Flatseal to modify RedNotebook's permissions.

Install and launch Flatseal, find RedNotebook in its list, and turn on the 'D-Bus session bus' option under the 'Socket' section:

When the next release of RedNotebook is ready, it should be possible to turn this back off again.