[MPlayer-users] Re: suid and Gtk failure

[Sven Hartge]

Miko Rider <miko-rider at attbi.com> wrote:

> Gtk apparently has a builtin mechanism that makes it refuse to init
> correctly if your program is suid or sgid. So the GUI isn't available.
> (It comes up but the menu actions don't work.  Just gor grin I tried
> to set the seteuid(getuid()) before gtkinit is called but that didn't
> seem to make any difference.

Right. Since around version 1.2.8, gtk+ refused to run setuid root.
xcdroast also suffered from this problem, but the author managed to get
around this.

But since xcdroast does not really need to be root, because you can set
the ownership of the needed devices to some group containing all the
allowed "burners", this was no real problem.

> Anyway, anybody else runs mplayer suid and have a workaround for that
> GUI problem ?

mplayer really _needs_ root, because the mere user can't setup the timer
intervall to the needed values, the kernel prevents this.

So, as a workaround, try using sudo to call mplayer, or write a tricky
wrapper (I _don't_ recommend this one.)

Or patch the Kernel to allow the user to set the needed timer-settings,
this patch was floating around this ML sometime after the rtc-code was
added to mplayer, so the archives should give you a hint.

S!

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