Arch Linux

Caffarius

Member

Registered: 2018-10-28

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Steam system tray when running as other user

Long time user, first time poster. I've been running Arch for my servers but finally got mad enough at Windows 10 to move my desktop over to the sane side.

I've been in the process of sorting all my Steam games out and decided to attempt to sandbox Steam itself into its own separate user account (similar to what is described in Running Wine under a separate user account) for extra security. Performance is great, sound is working beautifully, everything is working amazingly.

...except the system tray icon. I'm running Xfce as my desktop and launching Steam from a script set as follows:

/home/me/.scripts/steam.sh

#!/bin/bash
xhost +SI:localuser:steamuser
ln -sfn /dev/null /tmp/dumps
sudo -u steamuser /home/steamuser/.scripts/steam-steamuser.sh

/home/steamuser/.scripts/steam-steamuser.sh

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/steamuser
export HOME=/home/steamuser
export USER=steamuser
export USERNAME=steamuser
export LOGNAME=steamuser
export WINEARCH=win64
export XAUTHORITY=/home/steamuser/.Xauthority

/usr/bin/steam-runtime

I'm just a sysadmin trying to get my game on. 99% of my Linux experience has been TUI. If there's an easy way to pass a lone systray icon from steamuser to me, it's beyond my current knowledge. Currently if I close the Steam window in this configuration it will hide itself in the background, presumably sitting in the non-visible-to-me system tray of steamuser.

My current workaround is to have the steam.sh script wrapped in a dialog prompt that can force-kill the processes spawned by steamuser via...

sudo -u steamuser -- bash -c "kill -9 -1"

...and running Pidgin as me with pidgin-opensteamworks for chat capability. It works, but it's not as elegant as I'd prefer. Any help is appreciated.

Last edited by Caffarius (2018-10-28 13:59:21)

Caffarius

Member

Registered: 2018-10-28

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Steam system tray when running as other user

Never let it be said that beating your head against a wall was pointless. Today I learned to dbus-launch things that you want to communicate between user sessions.

The error was on this line:

sudo -u steamuser /home/steamuser/.scripts/steam-steamuser.sh

...changing it to...

sudo -u steamuser dbus-launch /home/steamuser/.scripts/steam-steamuser.sh

...gets this to work just fine.

I'm still open to any security issues that may be posed by running in this configuration as I'm fairly new to it. Otherwise I'm marking it as solved and leaving it for others to peruse.