Description
Let me prefix this by stating that this issue is of a critical nature as it prevents uploading to Arduino boards, thus breaking the ability for people to use their Arduinos in any meaningful way. I also wish to state that I am running Arch Linux, but I have reason to believe this issue affects Slackware, Fedora, and will start to affect many other distributions in the future.
Upon launching the Arduino IDE the terminal output presents the following error message:
check_group_uucp(): error testing lock file creation Error details:Permission deniedcheck_lock_status: No permission to create lock file.
I believe this is to due to the fact that the Arduino is attempting to write to the /run/lock directory which it should not be doing. It should write to the value of $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, this is typically /run/user/$UID.
Many wiki pages, including the Arduino Wiki and Arch Wiki are currently recommending that users chmod 777 their /run/lock directories in order to make Arduino work; this is obviously an excruciatingly bad idea. I will be updating the wiki pages to warn users against doing such dangerous action shortly after I finish this report.
The Arduino IDE should check the value of environmental variable $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and if the variable is undefined, use /run/user/$UID. The use of /run/lock should be avoided under all situations.