LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Toby Corkindale <tjcorkin@steadycom.com.au>
  To  : Andrew Pullin <drewp@bigpond.com>
  Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 00:36:17 +0000

Re: Couple of strange problems.

I don't know about your first problem, but the second one sounds
suspiciously like X is no longer SUID root. I'm not sure where the suid
root is supposed to be though, but maybe someone else will.
I don't see how this could really have occured though. But it's just a
thought that X DOES need to be suid root to access the video card
directly, and so if a user can't run it, it looks like it doesnt have
it's root priveleges.

Toby

Andrew Pullin wrote:
> 
> Hi Guys,
>     Couple of problems, unrelated on two different machines.
> 
> Problem 1.
> 
>     Machine running Redhat 5.2, has been running perfectly
> no problems. Just upgraded video card to a Diamond Viper550
> AGP card. Was running XFree86 3.1 or whatever was default
> with the APC disk, and this didn't like the new Video card
> so I downloaded  the latest X 3.3 and it now runs fine, no
> problems. Now here is the strange bit, the Printer, an HP
> DeskJet 670C, was running fine, but now it will only print
> Postscript. It will NOT print standard output or a text
> file. Went to the printer tool in X, printed PS, ascii to
> the port, ie dev/lpt0, this worked fine. Tried to print
> ascii test page and the error light on the printer started
> flashing and no output. Cannot pipe cat text to lp, ie.
>         cat .bashrc | lpr -lp
> weird. Can print PS through Ghostview. I just don't
> understand how this can happen when I have not changed
> anything remotely to do with the printer. The same symptoms
> occur if I am running X or not.
> 
> Problem 2.
> 
>     Machine is completely isolated from machine 1. Machine 2
> is an Intel Celeron 333, 128Mb RAM, Diamond Viper 330 AGP
> Video card. Installed a virgin copy of Redhat 5.2 from the
> APC disk. Machine appeared to set up fine, appeared to be
> working fine. X runs perfectly under root. Strange
> occurrence number 2 - created 1 user in the normal fashion,
> gave him a passwd etc. Logged in as that user, no problems.
> That user CANNOT run X. runs startx command and gets the
> initial grey screen with a cursor, and then it appears to
> hang. Fire off a trusty Ctrl-Alt-F1 and get the following
> message :
> 
> The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports :
> > Error    bad length in Geometry
> >            Output File "var/temp/Server-0.xkm" removed
> Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server
> Couldn't load XKB keymap, falling back to pre-XKB keymap
> xinit : unexpected error 2
> 
> Waiting for X server to shutdown
> 
> O.K. now I expect the last 2 lines were me when I Ctrl-C to
> kill the process. But how can it work fine for root but not
> a user in this case. The setup was a virgin install onto a
> virgin hard disk and was done in exactly the same way as I
> setup other machines that have no problems. I am a bit out
> of my depth here so basically help guys.
> 
>     Cheers!
>         Andrew
> 
> --
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