[Debian-eeepc-devel] Bug#471521: Bug#471521: vga-toggle.sh: does not do XAUTHORITY dance

[Trent W. Buck]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 09:26:27PM +0200, Damyan Ivanov wrote:
>> Also note that gdm uses a pseudorandomly-named temporary file in
>> /tmp rather than ~user/.Xauthority, so the current dance will not
>> work for them.
>
> FYI, my gnome (from sid) somehow manages to show the OSD notifications
> about volume changes, muting and wireless events.

I investigated further.  It appears GDM only dances when ~ is on a
root_squashed NFS, or when root is otherwise restricted from blatting
~/.Xauthority.  From #359629

| Be aware that if ${HOME} is mounted over NFS and that doesn't allow
| root the 'usual' arbitrary access to files then GDM will fail to
| fully access ~/.Xauthority and fallback to the /tmp/.gdm<random>
| file.  This is because for some such accesses it uses uid/gid 0,
| despite the fact that it does switch to the user's uid/gid for
| initial filechecks and creation of ~/.Xauthority if needed.

I guess an NFS /home on an eeePC laptop is a sufficiently edge case
that this tangential issue can be ignored.