Re: [gentoo-user] Permissions error on starting X.

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 10:01 AM Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>
>
> If you start your X server from the command line with, e.g. startx, you
> now need to set the new(?) suid USE flag for the xorg-server package.
>

Sometimes. I thought this was only required if you're not using KMS.
Is this not the case?

The argument for defaulting it is that you had to both be using a
non-KMS driver, and you had to be running from the command line.  That
is a somewhat uncommon situation.

> The developers, in this instance, failed to raise the ebuild's version
> number from 1.20.3 when making this change, and also didn't notify users
> by a NEWS item, that I can see.

A news item would probably have been a good idea (it almost always
is).  I'm not sure why the ebuild wasn't revisioned.  As far as I can
tell this change does change what gets installed on-disk, and as a
result it is almost always appropriate to revision the ebuild (in this
case to -r1).  The only sorts of changes that generally don't justify
revisioning would be fixes to build systems that don't actually impact
what gets installed (assuming the old version built at all), and which
don't change any dependencies.  In that case there isn't really a
benefit to users to do a rebuild, since the new build will be
identical to the old.

> So - if you get a permissions error whilst trying to start X, setting
> the suid USE flag may well be the solution.

Yup.

-- 
Rich