xorg-x11 may have broken my system

[George White]

Quoting Erik Hemdal <ehemdal at townisp.com>:

> 
> > From: George White
> 
> > Quoting Harry Nicholls <hnicholls at sympatico.ca>:
> > 
> > >[...] I accessed a Fedora mirror site and downloaded all the rpms for
> > > xorg-x11*.FC4.45  and used your suggestion of rpm -Uvh with the
> -oldpackages
> > > option.  Xserver :0 now work fines again.
> > 
> > Depends on what you mean by "fine" -- to me, a system on which "It is
> possible
> > for a user to gain elevated privileges by loading a specially crafted
> pixmap
> > image." (quoting from the announcement for xorg-x11 release 37.FC4.48.1)
> would
> > only be considered "fine" by the standards of a certain well-known large
> > software vendor, and certainly not by the linux community.
> > 
> 
> I think he means, "admittedly exposed to a threat, but at least able to
> boot and allow me to access a shell".
> 
> This hit me too, and took out X, the virtual consoles, and locked my
> system.  I had to hard stop the machine to recover and then boot into
> runlevel 3.  I also have an Intel 845 chipset.
> 
> I tried rolling back to the prior packages, but ran into dependency
> conflicts that prevented me from simply rolling back.
> 
> Reinstalling was the final fix on my system, as painful as that is.

People rush to install security fixes because their systems are exposed.  If 
you need the security patches, use the 37.FC4.48.1 VESA X-server until the fix
for your chipset is released.  Hopefully the fix will be released before the
pain due to using a slower X-server adds up to pain of doing a reinstall, and
it is almost certainly going to be less painful than being hacked!  

-- 
George N. White III
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia