Hi all, Where: GoLUG Online: https://meet.jit.si/golug When: Wednesday, 9/3/2025 7pm sharp Eastern Daylight time Arrive 15 minutes early for Microphone check & discussion Who: Steve Litt, Troubleshooter, Developer, Tech Writer What: Making a User Specific Runit
Runit is two different things: 1) An init system 2) A daemon supervisor This presentation focuses exclusively on #2, and is init system agnostic. You can deploy a user specific runit on any Unix-like computer, whether the system inits with sysvinit, systemd, runit, s3, OpenRC, the BSD init system, Epoch, Suckless Init with an rc script, or GNU Shepherd. The daemon supervisor part of runit supervises a group of daemons (long running background processes). A User Specific Runit is the supervisor part of runit, if and only if it is run by a normal user, runs programs as that normal user, and is controlled by that normal user. It's remarkably easy to implement. There are many ways of running User Specific Daemons, including from the init system itself and from cron jobs. Advantages a User Specific Runit has over doing it from the init system or cron include: 1) It can run after X has been instantiated by that user, so no ~/.Xauthority games are necessary to produce graphical daemons or daemons that fork off graphical windows. 2) It happens *after* the user logged in, so it has the right environment for the specific user. 3) It runs your home-grown C, Python, etc programs that would run on a terminal, in the background, without requiring your home-grown program to "background itself". 4) If it's forked from ~/.xinitrc then it has absolutely no interaction with your init system. It does one thing and does it well. 5) It's a nicer, more controllable way to control Pulseaudio. This will be demonstrated during the presentation. 6) It's perfect for a one-user power workstation. 7) Multiple users can each have their own personal Runit. 8) If a daemon crashes, your personal Runit restarts the daemon. 9) It can be built so that daemons of your choice have their own log files. The presentation will draw heavily from a website that's now very incomplete but will be very useful by Wednesday morning: https://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/normal_user_runit.htm The presentation will build a personal runit from scratch. If you want tighter and finer control over your personal computer, you'll want to attend this presentation. SteveT Steve Litt GoLUG Publicity Coordinator
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