Bug 7097

Summary:	authority problems when starting X
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Rene Uittenbogaard <ruittenbogaard>
Component:	XFree86	Assignee:	Preston Brown <pbrown>
Status:	CLOSED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-02-03 21:14:04 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Rene Uittenbogaard 1999-11-18 11:24:21 UTC

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?

Comment 1 Jed S. Baer 2000-02-03 05:18:59 UTC

I have the same problem, RH Service request 129465 - now closed. Because the
service request became very convoluted, I've posted a summary to my website.

  http://www.frii.com/~thag/startx-problem.html

Just FYI, hope it helps.

Comment 2 Preston Brown 2000-02-03 21:14:59 UTC

the main problem is you probably do not have a recent pam.  We have fixed this
dependency for 6.2, but for now, make sure you have the latest errata release of
pam.