thunderbird: keyboard does not work: Unable to connect to ibus

[fabianhick]

Hey,
after upgrading my installation to Ubuntu 20.04 I ran into the following issues:

Describe the bug
When running Thunderbird on Ubuntu 20.04 with firejail the keyboard input is broken.

Behavior change on disabling firejail
The keyboard input works as intended

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Start Thunderbird: firejail --private thunderbird
2. Try to enter something into the input fields
3. See error in terminal:

(thunderbird:17): IBUS-WARNING **: 02:56:35.752: Unable to connect to ibus: Could not connect: Connection refused
(thunderbird:17): IBUS-WARNING **: 02:56:39.831: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.
(thunderbird:17): IBUS-WARNING **: 02:56:39.877: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.
(thunderbird:17): IBUS-WARNING **: 02:56:39.905: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.

Expected behavior
Being able to input information with the keyboard.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal)

firejail version 0.9.62

Compile time support:
	- AppArmor support is enabled
	- AppImage support is enabled
	- chroot support is enabled
	- file and directory whitelisting support is enabled
	- file transfer support is enabled
	- firetunnel support is enabled
	- networking support is enabled
	- overlayfs support is enabled
	- private-home support is enabled
	- seccomp-bpf support is enabled
	- user namespace support is enabled
	- X11 sandboxing support is enabled

Additional context
This issues also appears in gedit.

[rusty-snake]

Can you try firejail --ignore=nodbus thunderbird.

[fabianhick]

@rusty-snake, I did try your command and the issue still persists.

[rusty-snake]

I cannot reproduce this in a ubu-focal test VM with firejail-git.

[JKjakay]

I have the same problem. However, I do not use --private but instead just run:
firejail thunderbird

The firejailed TB works as usual, but does not accept keyboard input. The ibus warning shows up in the console - to be exact, one time for every keypress, I think.

[fabianhick]

It doesn't work for me both with and without --private.
I can confirm @JKjakay's description of the issue in regards to keypresses.

[rusty-snake]

Can you try with firejail --ignore=private-tmp --ignore=tracelog --ignore="shell none" --ignore=protocol --ignore=nogroups --ignore=noroot --ignore=machine-id. If this works, remove ignores till it breaks again.

[fabianhick]

Thanks for the new command, @rusty-snake.
Unfortunately the issue still persists:

(thunderbird:10): IBUS-WARNING **: 23:06:29.152: Unable to connect to ibus: Could not connect: Connection refused

[rusty-snake]

Then you will need to comment every thing in thunderbird.profile and uncomment line for line to find the problematic line. (You can also uncomment a block of line and only go line for line in the block with the problematic line).

[fabianhick]

I did just try it out and commenting the line containing ignore nodbus in thunderbird.profile seems to solve the issue.
The initial error message (Unable to connect to ibus) still appears, but the Events queue isn't growing too big anymore and keyboard input is working again.

[rusty-snake]

So calling firejail (--private) --nodbus thunderbird works?

[fabianhick]

Yes indeed, @rusty-snake.
But I also just noticed that the thunderbird.profile on GitHub is different to mine from the Ubuntu Focal package...

[JKjakay]

Starting TB with

firejail --nodbus thunderbird

works for me, too

[paddyredbeard]

FWIW - I was having exactly the same issue with Chromium browser on a fresh upgrade to Pop!_OS 20.04 (based on Ubuntu 20.04). Per @JKjakay's comment, firejail --nodbus chromium resolves this for me.

[FlyingKawasaki74]

I had this issue with several applications (Thunderbird, Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, Text-Editor).
Using the --nodbus parameter helped (unless it's explicitely blocked like for Firefox, see issue #3408). Alternatively changing the profile files also helped (commenting out all dbus related lines in the main profile file)

Running it on Ubuntu 18.04

[rusty-snake]

Unfortunately we still do not know what the real reason is, or how it can be fixed. Blocking D-Bus breaks dconf and other things. It will not work with all programs.

[rusty-snake]

@buggitheclown @paddyredbeard @JKjakay @fabianhick can you try this: #116 (comment)

[paddyredbeard]

@rusty-snake GTK_IM_MODULE=xim firejail chromium works for me.

[rusty-snake]

ok, I'm now able to reproduce it. Ubuntu 20.04 (minimal) VM with firejail-git.

$ LC_ALL=C firejail --env=GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus --noprofile gedit
Parent pid 3034, child pid 3035
Child process initialized in 41.73 ms

(gedit:2): IBUS-WARNING **: 18:01:11.426: Unable to connect to ibus: Could not connect: Connection refused

(gedit:2): IBUS-WARNING **: 18:01:14.737: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.

(gedit:2): IBUS-WARNING **: 18:01:14.746: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.

(gedit:2): IBUS-WARNING **: 18:01:14.770: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.

(gedit:2): IBUS-WARNING **: 18:01:14.815: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.

Parent is shutting down, bye...

Thats are bad news, because it is broken even with --noprofile.

Knowed work arounds:

• nodbus/dbus-user none or net none, both don't work for all programs
• env GTK_IM_MODULE=xim and env QT_IM_MODULE=xim

[rusty-snake]

Problematic strace line (strace -f):
connect(14, {sa_family=AF_UNIX, sun_path=@"/home/ubuntu01/.cache/ibus/dbus-AyGV49uw"}, 41) = -1 ECONNREFUSED (Connection refused)

Looks like ibus is rejecting the connection. Maybe because of the PID-namespace?

[FlyingKawasaki74]

@rusty-snake

That workaround you linked doesn't work for me. I tried creating the signal-desktop file in my home directory and using the console command like @paddyredbeard
So far using --noprofile --nodbus worked with all programs that had the issue for me.
EDIT: I changed my user name so don't be surprised why a new name showed up in the convo

[rusty-snake]

electron doesn't use gtk, maybe QT_IM_MODULE=xim works.

[wellcomez]

@rusty-snake for my case, I think this caused by multi ibus configuration file under ~/.config/ibus/bus/ and one of them contains wrong socket address.

[rusty-snake]

What do you mean with "wrong address"?

[wellcomez]

What do you mean with "wrong address"?
wrong means it doesn't exis in.

[wellcomez]

What do you mean with "wrong address"?

• i found there are several ibus_addres_file under .config/ibus/bus. One of them will be chosen by firejail and used as ibus_address.
  Maybe it looks right because its filename is confirmed with naming rule, but really it doesn't point to living unix socket.
  After i remove all these files ,keyboard works. After reboot again, new ibus_address file appears, then try gedit again, it also works.
• Another finding:
  I use ss i can find ibus_address used by system is different with ibus_address which is set to sandbox by firejail.

[vaindru]

* i found there are several ibus_addres_file under .config/ibus/bus. One of them will be chosen by firejail and used as ibus_address.
  Maybe it looks right because  its filename is confirmed with naming rule, but really it doesn't point to living unix socket.
  **After i remove all these files ,keyboard  works**. After reboot again, new ibus_address file appears, then try gedit again, it also works.

* Another finding:
  I use ss i can find ibus_address used by system is different with ibus_address which is set to sandbox by firejail.

This saved me! Firefox didn't recognize keyboard input and also a friend had another editor software with same problem and it helped too. Thanks!:)

[wazaberry]

Thanks a lot Welcomez... deleting .config/ibus/bus did the trick and the keyboard now works in Firefox :)