Re: Root can't run X programs
On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 07:10:06AM -0500, David Krider wrote:
|| Cameron Hutchison wrote:
||
|| >The next bit of juju is to set the environment variable XAUTHORITY to
|| >~<user>/.Xauthority, where <user> is the user that started the xserver.
This shouldn't be necessary, since X clients default to $HOME/.Xauthority
for locating xauth cookies when XAUTHORITY is undefined.
Ahh, wait, I missed the context. You're setting XAUTHORITY as root
to ~mortaluser/.Xauthority. That's a good option.
|| This is great. What about taking it to the next level? What I mean is
|| that I had been thinking about actually extracting the cookie from the
|| server's auth file and sticking it in root's .Xauthority file for good
|| (this is what Red Hat does), but I wasn't sure if the auth file changed
|| on Debian.
Xdm generates a fresh cookie for every session and transmits it to
the X server through the XDMCP protocol.
Startx generates a fresh cookie for the session being started. Or
it least, it should.
|| Unforunately, after checking, it seems like the auth file
|| does change on every start of the X server.
You can modify the startx script to copy the cookie to ~root/.Xauthority.
Picking up the cookie that xdm uses can be done in the Xsession
script which is run at the beginning of every session. Or actually,
Xsession *is* the session under xdm, IIRC. I think the cookie is
stored somewhere in /var/run/xdm/auth/something. Check your xdm
config files for details.
However, I don't think this should be done by default, because it
would come too close to violating the privacy of the users, especially
for remote X session.
|| I see that
|| /etc/kde2/kdm/Xservers has a line to start the X server, but in a `ps
|| -ef' listing, I see an additional "-auth" option. How does this get to
|| be a part of the command?
Not sure about kdm. Can't remember if xdm does this too, but I don't
think so.
Ciao. Vincent.
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