Description of problem: Both FreeCiv's server and client refuse to run as root, displaying no error message when run from the menu. (An error message is displayed only when run from a terminal.) FreeCiv should either be modified to run as root (which was allowed in the past), or it should be removed from the menus for the root user's desktop. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): freeciv-1.14.2-1
>Both FreeCiv's server and client refuse to run as root That's a feature, not a bug. >FreeCiv should either be modified to run as root No way. If upstream changes this, ok. But I'm not going to spend any time on this. The right fix for this would be to disallow root running an X desktop alltogether. This would prevent users from doing their day-to-day work as the superuser and screw their system up. Or even worse, compromise their system and their companies infrastructure by hitting browser or mail exploits.
If gdm should not allow root to login and "startx" should refuse to run as root, please file one or more bugs to that effect and mark this bug (136921) as blocking on your new one or ones. Otherwise, if FreeCiv can not be made to work correctly while logged in as the root user, it should be removed from the menus for the root user's desktop. Please do not re-close this until the misbehavior is no longer present. Thanks.
We don't have per-user menus, there's no way to remove a menu entry just for root. File a bug against redhat-menues if you'd like to have another opinion about running an X desktop as root. Assign this to the X or the GDM maintainer, but don't waste my time with this. reopening just results in one more bugzilla on my ignore list.
Please do not re-close this until the misbehavior is no longer present. Thanks.
Silent failure is terrible for usability. There should be a message telling the user it won't run as root. Disallowing root login is not really an option unless we were able to add sudo-like hooks to the desktop (file manager, text editor, etc). In the mid to long term we cannot require people (administrators included) to use shell.
This is apparently a regression; bug 28928 mentions similar problems and, while I'm looking at its fix still being applied in our .spec, it seems the fix used for 28928 no longer works. I have no idea why the patch was never upstreamed.
Fix for FC4. I changed the wrapper to try harder to run as user nobody, and added checks to detect failure and report an error to the user. UI signed off by snickell.