xorg-x11 may have broken my system

[Erik Hemdal]

> 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.

Erik