Re: magic cookie error

[Christian van Enckevort <chris@warande1125.warande.uu.nl>]

Hi,

One way to solve this problem would be using 'xhost +localhost' to enable
connections to the X server from your own machine. However, this may
compromise security (probably not much of a concern for a single user
machine). Trying this out I noticed that on my machine I can also use start
an Xwindows program as root using sudo <progname> <parameters> (including
an xterm window from which I can then start arbitrary X programs).

Another less convenient, but presumably more secure method is the following:

$ xauth list $DISPLAY # mark the output
$ su -
# xauth add <paste the above line>
# export DISPLAY=<display mentioned in the pasted line.)

I found this in Linux Gazette #26. There some other methods are mentioned as
well.

If anybody knows more about potential security risks for any of these
methods, I would be interested.

Greetings,

Christian van Enckevort