Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] GUI in Linux

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 12:06:17 -0800
Scott Lowrey wrote:

If you're logged into your Linux box as a non-root user running KDE, an Ethereal window running as root (via sudo, su, whatever) will not appear on the local display unless you make the change I described -- on SuSE 9.1 :). Maybe it's a root thing - the connection is apparently being made via TCP on the loopback. Or they're blocking the domain sockets, too, although I doubt that.

That's bizarre. If DISPLAY is set to :0.0, it shouldn't be connecting over TCP. What does "sudo env" report the value of DISPLAY as?

Access over UNIX-domain sockets is, I think, authenticated based on the user ID of the connecting process on at least some platforms where credentials can be sent over the socket; this includes Linux. It *might* be that if the connection fails over the UNIX-domain socket, XLib tries doing a TCP connection to localhost:6000, in which case doing an xhost to allow root to open windows locally should work as well (without exposing your X server to other hosts on the network).