qtile: [SOLVED] Libinput does not work as expected on wayland

The issue:

Libinput is not working as expected for qtile (no issues on manjaro-gnome-liveusb). I expected e.g. my touchpad to work (enabling tap), but nothing happened and defaults were loaded. I think this is a bug.

The bug / logs:

In the tty after closing qtile (not in the qtile log) I can see the same as in this discussion as the very first message libinput error: failed to load the device quirks from /usr/share/libinput and /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks. However my qtile starts normally and everything else works.
in the qtile log there is a relevant line: ERROR libqtile inputs.py:_configure_pointer():L251 Qtile was not built with libinput configuration support. For support, pywlroots must be installed at build time.

What I did (reproducability):

installed from source (pip install --user .) following the correct order of package installs and running make run-ffibuild after installing dependencies and before pip install
default config

I have no idea what is wrong and where this issue even originates (my debugging efforts were fruitless, nothing in pywlroots or pywayland). Any help is welcome.

System Details

Asus Vivobook M4103QA
Linux: 5.15.59-gentoo-dist
qtile version: 0.21.1.dev87+g2ecbb5fd
wlroots: 0.15.1
pywlroots: 0.15.19
cairocffi: 1.3.0
cffi: 1.15.1
xcffib: 0.11.1

Required:

I have searched past issues to see if this bug has already been reported.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 2 years ago
Comments: 20 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@clotodex Maybe try to link libinput in the same way? Maybe more libs are broken.

oddlama on Aug 11, 2022

Please re-open if still an issue with the latest release

jwijenbergh on Nov 26, 2023

@clotodex i indeed have all those installed

EDIT: wlroots package on arch is out of date

Magnitudexx on Nov 24, 2022

It’s excellent that you’ve found a solution. I think I can reproduce the issue though instead of the error you get, the whole process exits silently when it tries to set a keyboard’s keymap at startup, inside a pywlroots cffi function. Similarly your allpatch.sh script executed on pywlroots’ and pywayland’s .lib folders fixes the issue.

Normally it works without issue for me because I run all the python deps from source. The issue persists when installing deps with pip, either into user folders in .local or into a venv.

This is definitely a huge issue, and I don’t really know where it’s coming from, whether it’s us (probably) or some part of the build machinery. In the meantime I’ll re-open this because as far as I can tell, pip install qtile is therefore completely non-functional.

m-col on Aug 17, 2022

SOLVED! My latest update to the install script reproducibly solves the issue.

Reason for the issue: cffi is a bit finicky. The trick:

patch all libraries, especially ffi libraries in the python environment (as discussed in the beginning of the thread)
BEFORE pip install . you need to manually build qtile with python setup.py build --build-scripts=scripts install.

While the make run-ffibuild executes correctly and builds the c files etc, none of it is later transferred to the virtualenv (or user packages) => no _libinput => no libinput support.

@m-col I don’t know if this can be fixed in the setup.py script or with other installation advice.

In any case I see this issue as solved for now.

clotodex on Aug 17, 2022

@oddlama seems to have found a workaround for the quirks issue. Logs from the chatroom (thanks @oddlama):

[ 18:10 ] oddlama : I had the same issue
[ 18:10 ] oddlama : The solution is quite simple
[ 18:13 ] oddlama : dannycolin: You need to remove libxkbcommon-de59cad2.so.0.0.0 from wherever it was installed to (in case of pip probably .local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/pywlroots.libs/libxkbcommon-de59cad2.so.0.0.0) and replace it with a link to your system's libxkbcommon
[ 18:13 ] oddlama : for me it was ln -s /usr/lib64/libxkbcommon.so path/to/libxkbcommon-de59cad2.so.0.0.0

I’m not sure what the underlying cause is, be it build steps in qtile, pywlroots or python-xkbcommon, but perhaps this workaround will do in the meantime until a proper fix is determined?

m-col on Aug 11, 2022