sudo + X problem? (was:Re: dapper settings has miscellaneous Display)

[Simon Edwards]

On Friday 17 February 2006 00:46, Achim Bohnet wrote:
> On Thursday 16 February 2006 08:46, Simon Edwards wrote:
> form earlier in the thread:
> 
> >> What does "sudo echo $DISPLAY" give?
> 
> The $DISPLAY is expanded by user shell
> _before_ sudo is executed.  I would suggest comparing output of

Right you are. I've been comparing the results of "env" and "sudo env" on 
breezy and dapper and I can't see what the difference is. strace is telling 
me that the problem is finding the .Xauthority file.

> > Just some more info that I've found by using strace.
> > 
> > Running 'displayconfig' and 'sudo displayconfg' on breezy both 
> > use /home/sbe/.Xauthority. But doing 'displayconfig' on dapper 
> > uses /home/sbe/.Xauthority while 'sudo displayconfg' tries to use 
> > '/root/.Xauthority'!
> Hmm, then $HOME gets maybe redefined?   That's one way how it can
> go wrong  (see man xauth. Section FILES and ENVIRONMENT and -f)

$HOME stays on /home/sbe/, which is correct. Doing "export 
XAUTHORITY=/home/sbe/.Xauthority" before running "sudo displayconfig" does 
fix the problem. As suggested by Rajeev, kdesu does work too. (It appears to 
make a temporary .Xauthority in /tmp and then set $XAUTHORITY).

> > My python code uses the C function XOpenDisplay() to open the X display. 
> > (DISPLAY=:0.0)

What boogles my noggin is that running "sudo konsole" works, but with quite a 
few complaints that the X server can't be reached. ("sudo konsole" 
automatically starts up a bunch of othe kde daemons and programs for the root 
user). "sudo xterm" also works fine and can find /home/sbe/.Xauthority. So I 
don't know what I'm doing wrong here, or if the toolkits have their own code 
for setting handling xauthority...

cheers,

-- 
Simon Edwards             | KDE-NL, Guidance tools, Guarddog Firewall
simon at simonzone.com       | http://www.simonzone.com/software/
Nijmegen, The Netherlands | "ZooTV? You made the right choice."