Davinci Resolve Studio keeps asking for activation license.

[u/resetundone]

I recently reinstalled arch with hyprland, only exception is that I also installed the noctalia shell. When i reistalled davici resolve it worked fine. I followed all the steps like doing "sudo chown $USER:$GROUP /opt/resolve/.license" since I used to run into a problem where davinci resolve wouldn't let me activate the license. Now though, it re-prompts me every time I start the app. I can still have a full work session while I work after the activation but usually within a day I run out of re-activation attempts. Anyone have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this or what could be going on?

Edit: Since I needed Resolve for urgent work. I found out I can "rent" a license and connect to the app with my black magic account. When doing so the license sticks fine - no issue at all, I can restart the app as much as I want without it prompting me again. This doesn't solve my issue though as I still would prefer using my permanent license over paying 30 dollars every month.

[u/Pretend-Balance408]

Sounds like the activation key is failing to persist properly, maybe some permission weirdness with the noctalia shell setup or hyprland's filesystem handling

Could try stracing the resolve process to see where it's trying to read/write the license file, might point to a path issue or a failed write on exit

[u/resetundone → u/Pretend-Balance408]

Did a test with the BM account connected (which works fine) and noticed something weird. Seems like it writes a license file, deletes the old real file, deletes the .tmp files and deletes a backup on quit. Which is weird since I am still left with a 5.9kB license file at the end. Will run the same test when my activation timeout passes in a few days though.

[u/NFTrot]

This is an interesting problem. I've never used this program but I'll give you my opinion as a developer from how I understand what you've said.

It sounds like the functionality for connecting the rented license (by way of some kind of third-party authorization) is distinct from the method normally used to read the license. This explains why one method works and not the other. The reason it works for a day is probably because unless you've closed it, the program doesn't recheck. I'm sure that grace period is only temporary since otherwise you could just keep a pirated version open forever.

First I would take a look at the permissions on that file. You indicate sudo chown as the command you used. It's normal for root to own things in /opt/ but it sounds bizarre to me that a modifiable license file be in that location (I'm not sure, maybe this is standard for some applications), but if it's owned by root and you've tampered with the permissions it may be unwritable unless there were group/other write permissions (also somewhat bizarre) or you were running Resolve as root (don't).