How to setuid X.org?

How to setuid X.org?

[dian_cecht]

Hello,

     I have tried several times to get X.org (/bin/X, specifically)
setuid for obvious reasons. However, I can't find any examples of usage
and attempting to follow the infopages has led to a bunch of different
errors and failures (and rather useless error messages). I currently
don't have any useful logs of what I tried and the output (it was on a
LiveUSB I'm using for testing purposes), but I'm not wanting to use
%desktop-services (or other service packs, for that matter), which has
already been suggested.

Can someone either A) improve the documents for setuid programs (and
gexps) with some practical examples, or B) provide me with a (hopefully
working) snippet to add to the config?

Either would work for me, though the previous option is clearly the
better of the two.

Re: How to setuid X.org?

[Marius Bakke]

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dian_cecht@zoho.com writes:

> Hello,
>
>      I have tried several times to get X.org (/bin/X, specifically)
> setuid for obvious reasons. However, I can't find any examples of usage
> and attempting to follow the infopages has led to a bunch of different
> errors and failures (and rather useless error messages). I currently
> don't have any useful logs of what I tried and the output (it was on a
> LiveUSB I'm using for testing purposes), but I'm not wanting to use
> %desktop-services (or other service packs, for that matter), which has
> already been suggested.
>
> Can someone either A) improve the documents for setuid programs (and
> gexps) with some practical examples, or B) provide me with a (hopefully
> working) snippet to add to the config?

Setuid programs are documented here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Setuid-Programs

Following the "passwd" example, making "X" setuid root would be declared
like this:

(operating-system
  [...]
  (setuid-programs
   (cons #~(string-append #$xorg-server "/bin/X")
         %setuid-programs))

It's not clear to me how to improve this since it's very similar to how
other defaults are overridden. Any suggestions?

TIA!

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Re: How to setuid X.org?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

<dian_cecht@zoho.com> skribis:

>      I have tried several times to get X.org (/bin/X, specifically)
> setuid for obvious reasons. However, I can't find any examples of usage
> and attempting to follow the infopages has led to a bunch of different
> errors and failures (and rather useless error messages). I currently
> don't have any useful logs of what I tried and the output (it was on a
> LiveUSB I'm using for testing purposes), but I'm not wanting to use
> %desktop-services (or other service packs, for that matter), which has
> already been suggested.

To complement what Marius wrote, note that you don’t have to use
‘%desktop-services’ as-is to get X running.  You can remove services you
don’t want from ‘%desktop-services’ as shown at
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Using-the-Configuration-System.html#System-Services>
(search for “remove”), or you can build your own service list.

In the latter case, you’ll want at least ‘slim-service’ or
‘sddm-service’ for the graphical login manager.  See
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/X-Window.html> and
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/services/desktop.scm#n749>.

If you don’t want a graphical login manager, the solution would be to
install ‘xinit’ (which provides the ‘startx’ command) rather than make
Xorg setuid-root.  However, people reported in the past that there were
problems with ‘xinit’, though I forgot what it was.

HTH,
Ludo’.

Re: How to setuid X.org?

[dian_cecht]

On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:50:21 +0100
ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:
> However, people reported in the past that there were problems with
> ‘xinit’, though I forgot what it was.

I booted into the LiveUSB I was using for testing and xinit/startx was
looking for X in it's own directory. I didn't try changing anything,
but if you are refering to some breakage with startx, that is what I
ran across.