Douglas Gilbert wrote:
>
> I'm trying to use devfs (with the default configuration of devfsd) on
> a slightly modified RH 6.0 i386 platform. When I call startx it fails
> with an authentication error in xinit. [Works with the classic /dev .]
> Any guidance?
>
> Doug Gilbert
I'm having the exact same problem, on 2.3.48. It complains that I might
not own the console. /dev/tty0 exists, and is a link to /dev/vc/0. The
permissions on it are a little weird:
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Feb 29 15:50 /dev/tty0 -> vc/0
I've tried changing them with a PERMISSIONS string in devfsd.conf and
directly, but of course chmod does not work on links--only on the file
that the link points to. And evidently, X thinks that it cannot write
to tty0, because tty0 (and *all* the symlinks, every last one of them
under /dev) do not have the write bit set. Admittedly, this is not a
problem on such devices as /dev/cdrom, or other read-only media, but
when you have apps with the old names hard-coded (like X), and want to
make symlinks to satisfy those hard-codings, but the symlinks won't let
you make them lrwxrwxrwx, you can get rather frustrated.
root@reliant:/dev$ ls -l tty0
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Feb 29 15:50 tty0 -> vc/0
root@reliant:/dev$ rm -f tty0
root@reliant:/dev$ ls -l tty0
ls: tty0: No such file or directory
root@reliant:/dev$ ln -sf vc/0 tty0
root@reliant:/dev$ ls -l tty0
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Feb 29 23:07 tty0 -> vc/0
This would seem to be a fairly major failing in either devfs or devfsd.
Is it a known bug, or really a bug? How do we fix it? It doesn't seem
to be documented anywhere. I've tried playing with the umask, and
deleting/recreating symlinks, but nothing seems to work. Is there some
undocumented configuration option that I should know about?
TIA for answers. devfs has gone through some extreme changes since
2.2.x. Once upon a time, it was fairly effortless and bug-free, and
compiling the patch into the kernel was really all that was required.
Now, it seems needlessly complicated. For systems developers, I guess
that's not an issue--as they like to spend extraordinary amounts of time
in making a system work, as opposed to the rest of us who just want to
use the system.
-- Matthew Vanecek Visit my Website at http://mysite.directlink.net/linuxguy For answers type: perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);' ***************************************************************** For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me. I'm always getting in the way of something...- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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