Re: problems with X in hamm
On 17 Jul, Peter S Galbraith wrote:
>
> "Carlo U. Segre" wrote:
>
>> I have been trying to install a new machine with the frozen hamm
>> distribution and I am running into 2 problems with X11.
>>
>> 1. No user outside root is allowed to start X11. This may be a
>> configuration issue but I know that this did not happen in Debian 1.3
>>
>> 2. I use a S3 ViRGE video card and I am noticing that I have a corrupted
>> text console screen when I exit X (running it as root, of course). This
>> happens both when I am using the SVGA server and the S3V server.
>>
>> I am about to drop back to 1.3 out of frustration but wondered if these
>> problems are just my incompetence...
>
> A similar problem was reported by Stephen Ryan in the debian-devel list.
> If he figures it out perhaps he can help you.
For the first problem, I only know of two things - the fact that
/usr/bin/X11/X should be suid root, and the /etc/X11/Xserver should
have "Console" as the second line, to allow anyone logged into the
console to start the X server. Anything beyond that, and I'm lost.
Sorry.
For the second problem, I don't have a fix so much as a workaround,
discovered in trying to troubleshoot the cause for my problem - nobody
can run the X server, not even root, because it crashes every time with
a Bus Error. This appears to be a bug related to some PCI based video
cards and certain types of PCI bus controllers. In the course of
trying to troubleshoot this, Gregory Stark passed on this neat hack:
<copied from a post by Gregory in the debian-devel list>
>Incidentally here's a useful hack:
>in /etc/kbd/default.map bind Spawn_Console to some unused key:
> control keycode 127 = Spawn_Console
>
>in /etc/inittab:
> kb::kbrequest:restoretextmode -r /var/tmp/restoretext.regs
>
>and run:
> restoretextmode -w /var/tmp/restoretext.regs
>
>Then you can press that key combination to restore text mode after an svgalib
>app, or now X, has messed it up. On a multi-user system /var/tmp might not be
>a good choice for security though.
I haven't tried this little hack for fixing corrupted text mode screens
yet, as I'm still rebuilding my system from the effects of the HP
"recovery" disk, which "recovered" my system by erasing all the
partitions; it looks to me like you might need the svgatextmode package
to use it.
HTH,
--
Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux
Mathematics graduate student, Dartmouth College
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