RE: after upgrade to redhat 7.2, X don't start, console ownership problem

[Jani Jaakkola <jjaakkol cs Helsinki FI>]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Swanson, Bryan wrote:

> this may seem obvious, but is /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86
> setuid root?

It does not need to be, unless you really want to give all users
(including users from network) the right to start X servers on your
console.

However, RH changed the way pam_console saves who has the console
ownership. It is now two files /var/run/console.lock and
/var/run/console/<username>.  I dont know why, but this is probably
documented in the sources, implicitly if not explicitly :). The way
pam_console saves console ownership should not  matter as long as you are
just using pam_console and trust it to do its thing. If pam_console is not
needed, removing it from /etc/pam.d/xserver (and using some other
pam_modules perhaps?) should be quite sufficient.

/usr/bin/X11/X should be a symlink to /usr/bin/X11/Xwrapper. Xwrapper
checks (using PAM) the the user has console ownership before it allows X
to be started. So remote users cannot start X.

AFAIK, is works just as it is intended to work. I missed the start of the
thread, so i don't know what was the problem..

- Jani