Re: [Plplot-devel] linuxvga driver

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> I cannot remember whether it was Maurice or Geoffrey who investigated this a
> long time ago, but according to my memory of the results back then you
> always need root in order to use this driver. Therefore, I have never run or
> tested it.  If there is no way to get around this root-only limitation of
> libsvga, I think this driver should be disabled in the interests of security.
>

For what it is worth, there might be a way to run and test this driver
safely.  Apparently
(http://packages.debian.org/testing/libs/svgalib1-libggi2.html) you can run
a svgalib wrapper on top of libggi.  In turn this can be run
(http://packages.debian.org/testing/libs/libggi2.html) on top of a lot of
different backends.  If you choose to run libggi on top of X, there should
be no root problem. But whether this all works depends on how good the
wrapper is.  Also, there are complications in building against
svgalib1-libggi2 and also apparently a lot of configuration is required to
get a particular svgalib application to work.  I don't have time to
investigate any further, however.