Cannot unlock using purchased license key

[iswrong]

I am using SoftMaker Office on NixOS (20.03). When I try to unlock using the license key, I get the following error:

The application cannot create a unique identifier.
Please make sure the application has sufficient permissions.

I also get the same error when trying to unlock FreeOffice (with my FreeOffice product code), which used to work with an older version of NixOS.

I strace-ed the program and didn't see anything weird, except some execution of UNIX programs to probe /etc/os-release. Maybe this file has an unexpected format? Just in case, this is the current content of that file on my system:

Code: Select all

NAME=NixOS
ID=nixos
VERSION="19.09.840.8bf142e001b (Loris)"
VERSION_CODENAME=loris
VERSION_ID="19.09.840.8bf142e001b"
PRETTY_NAME="NixOS 19.09.840.8bf142e001b (Loris)"
LOGO="nix-snowflake"
HOME_URL="https://nixos.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html"
SUPPORT_URL="https://nixos.org/nixos/support.html"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues"

[martin-k]

SoftMaker Office places the license file in /etc/SoftMaker. Ensure that your application has access to this folder and can write to it.

[iswrong]

SoftMaker Office places the license file in /etc/SoftMaker. Ensure that your application has access to this folder and can write to it.

No dice. I have created that directory and made my user the owner (sudo chown daniel:users /etc/SoftMaker). TextMaker creates /etc/SoftMaker/hunspell. But the error persists.

I inspected the trace a bit more and found that when registering, TextMaker executes /bin/ls as an absolute path. NixOS does not follow FHS and does not have /bin/ls (the only program is /bin/sh, which is a symlink to bash in the Nix store).

So, I temporary created /bin/ls as a symlink. When this symlink is present I can unlock and TextMaker starts successfully. If I remove the symlink, TextMaker shows the same error again when it starts. I guess we'll have to run SoftMaker Office a FHS sandbox.

[miguel-c]

Hi, I reported the issue to the developers.

[iswrong]

Awesome! Thanks a lot!

[iswrong]

In the meanwhile, this workaround does the job:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/71460

(Use LD_PRELOAD to intercept execve calls and rewrite /bin/ls to the actual path on the NixOS machine.)