Re: SEUL: Stopping X

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

> On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Kevin Forge wrote:
> > The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > > No, that is only one point of XDM. There are a lot of other reasons.
> > > Not having to restart X, preventing people from dropping back to text mode
> > > and panicking (unless they need to:), avoiding another failure-point
> > > (SVGAlib) and a number of other reasons.
> > Sorry for my ignorance, but how do XDM and SVGAlib affect each other ?
> No, it is just that there was a proposal (wasn't it yours? :) that we
> should use an svgalib-based login screen in leiu of XDM. SVGAlib, while
> more reliable than X on unknown video hardware, is still a possible point

This (reliabilty of SVGAlib) is entirely untrue.  SVGAlib uses
graphics mode and is confronted to the same problems than X except
than SVGAlib is nearly dead and is minimally maintained.  In addition
_every_ SVGAlib program runs setuid root and uses some very dangerous
system calls than allow it to crash Linux easily.  That makes SVGAlib
programs a big security risk.  The same can be said of an X server
except than you only have to keep watch on the server.

Curses (and not SVGAlib) programs allow to make character-based
pseudographics execept than they run in character mode (no problems
with unsupported cards), and don't require special privileges.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

"For drinking muddy water if that is the water of truth,
            for that the camel is needed"