On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Bill Currie wrote: > On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 04:46:32PM -0800, Jim Carter wrote: > > However, when the current user did not have permission to write on card0 > > (due to mode 0660 group video, the default provided by SuSE SaX2) > > Wouldn't it be better to add the user to group video?
That's reasonable on a personal laptop, but in a school computer lab or a cartful of laptops for public checkout, the sysop doesn't really want to have to put every undergrad in the school into group video. (For one thing, there's a nasty limit of 1024 bytes per line in /etc/group, at least on Solaris.) Similarly, for a while about 10 years ago we had a three-headed setup where one CPU served its own video card, plus two other users on X-terminals, and it gave us 30 seats in a lab until we could scrape up the money for something better. The point is, you have to deal with arbitrary users on the console and multiple users on the CPU. The "right" way to handle it (not available 10 years ago) is for a PAM module (pam_devperm.so) to chown a list of devices to the console user, locking out all others. Specifically from mapping the console user's homework in video RAM. It works for /dev/cdrom, /dev/modem, /dev/mouse, /dev/dsp, /dev/midi0, etc., apparently with no special support in the drivers beyond a generic devfs interface, so why does it break /dev/dri/card0? James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key) _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel