Bug 7097

Last weekend I upgraded my rh6.0 installation from XFree86-3.3.2-8 to
XFree86-3.3.5-3 using rpm -U. All the packages which it requires were
upgraded as well. I did not change the XF86Config file. Then when I tried
to use 'startx' from tty1, the following error message occurred:

Authentication failed - cannot start X server.
Perhaps you do not have console ownership?

I was, however, able to start an X session using xdm or when running startx
as root.



A related symptom was the following:
when entering 'startx -- :2' , (according to a debug 'echo' line in startx)
the startx script tries to run the command:

xinit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc -- :2 /home/rene/.xserverrc -auth
/home/rene/.Xauthority

which gives the following error:
Unrecognized option: /home/rene/.xserverrc

After moving the .xserverrc to /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc and issuing the
same command, it tries to run:

xinit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc -- :2 /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc -auth
/home/rene/.Xauthority

but this gives a different error:
Authentication failed - cannot start X server.
Perhaps you do not have console ownership?

I think this is very strange.

I was able to solve the problem by symlinking /usr/X11R6/bin/X to
/usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA and making XF86_SVGA suid root, followed by a
little hacking into the startx script in order to pass the command line
values to xinit in the correct order.
(i.e. xinit $clientargs -- $whichserver $display $serverargs)

I was wondering whether this is a bug or whether this is due to a wrong
method of upgrading the X server?