Running virt-manager on wayland

Fedora 26 introduces Wayland as the new display server protocol, and this introduces new challenges.

The wayland developers have chosen not to support running a GUI application as root: which breaks virt-manager and virt-viewer.  Both applications need to run as root, in order for them to execute commands such as mount and etc...

There seems to be very little way around this, except to temporarily allow root execution using:

$ xhost +si:localuser:root

Permission can later be revoked using:

$ xhost -si:localuser:root

I hope that a more elegant solution will be forthcoming from either the wayland or libvirt developers.

Recording Audio in CentOS

Today, I needed a tool to quickly and effectively record audio from a microphone connected to my computer, in order to test it.  I didn't have time to start playing around with Audacity settings to figure out how to get it to work properly, so I decided to look around for something else.  As it turns out, there is a nice little command line tool which allows for quick and dirty recording: sox.

All I had to do was:

$ sox -t alsa default out.wav

Bingo, instant recording for very basic purposes.  I'm sure the manual page will yield much more interesting features.