[Solved] FAHControl doesn't work on Fedora 31: needs Python2

[Markus_Laker]

If run from a desktop environment, FAHControl silently fails during startup. If run from a bash prompt, it fails more informatively:

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[msl@localhost ~]$ FAHControl 
  File "/usr/bin/FAHControl", line 57
    if sock.recv(1024).strip() == 'OK': print 'Ok'
                                                 ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
[msl@localhost ~]$

Python 2 and Python 3 are incompatible in several ways that are provoked by this script. Python 3 is the default Python in Fedora 31 -- that's what you get if you run /usr/bin/python. However, Python 2 is available as /usr/bin/python2 for backwards-compatibility. If I change the first line from

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#!/usr/bin/python

to

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#!/usr/bin/python2

then FAHControl starts normally.

A cleaner solution -- which is what I've actually done -- is to take a copy of FAHControl into a directory that's both under my home directory and on my path, and to modify the copy.

Perhaps the developers could modify the shebang line in the next release, so that this workaround isn't necessary?

[Gleep]

Thanks for sharing the solution for this. I installed FAH on Fedora 31 this weekend and I was scratching my head on why FAHControl was failing to start, then spotted this post.