Star Running X Without Root Privileges
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th May 2008 20:35 UTC, submitted by diegocg
X11, Window Managers The X Windowing System is the graphical backbone of most UNIX-like operating systems (and OpenVMS) - despite lots and lots of criticism, the system has withstood the test of time. Despite its age, development on X has not slowed down - in fact, it only seems to have picked up. A few weeks ago, we had kernel-based mode setting, and today we have the X server running as user instead of root.
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Doc Pain
Member since:
2006-10-08

indeed, xfree didnt add much new for ages.
but i think it was a modified license that was the final nail.

end result, a forked xfree from before the license change and xorg picked up speed after that.


Without wanting to sound impolite, I'd like to comment that XFree at least got things working (in "the old days", i. e. 3 years ago) that Xorg isn't able to do anymore. (Please see this note as an individual problem I'm having since I upgraded from FreeBSD 5 to 7, including an upgrade from XFree 4.3 to the newest version of Xorg: I can't get my ATI Radeon 9200 RV250 with the ati driver to run at 1400x1050 anymore, only 1152x864 is possible; and switch from console to X mode now lasts almost 10 seconds, while it lasted less than 2 seconds with XFree.)

and with things like beryl, multi-input x servers (perfect for multitouch setups), and others, its fast catching up to or overtaking the tricks that osx and windows can show of.


Is catching up? I think it's already doing those tricks, and many more. :-)


and all this while retaining the core ability to do things over a network connection and you have one impressive package.


The networking abilities have always been one of the most impressive things in X. Remote desktops and similar stuff were possible years before others had an acceptable network stack. :-)

one can even turn a single home computer into a multi user machine with these abilities. a kind of mini-mainframe if you will.


To be precise, a home computer running UNIX / Linux is a multi user machine. It's just about how you enable two or more users to use the same machine at the same time. This isn't some speciality of X, but of UNIX / Linux in general.

i suspect that as kernel mode setting becomes more of a norm in the drivers, the biggest reason for running X as root goes away. makes me a bit nostalgic as i always liked the idea of pre-95 windows, that ability to drop in and out of the gui as needed.


This option will still be present, I think. At least, I hope. But well, I do use BSD, so it will take some time before the kernel mode settings developed for Linux will make their way into BSD. :-)

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