Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > > why not just > > startx -- +xinerama > > yep. tried that too. was working at first. > > > and if you want it the default alias your startx > > > > alias startx 'startx -- +xinerama' > > it's not a matter of making it *work* (got that done.. cheated and made > XFree86 SUID root); I want to find out how it's supposed to work. :) If that's what you wanted :) (I must have missed an earlier part of the conversation) X doesn't need to run as root. X can run as the user but the devices (like keyboard, mouse, display buffers, and some other things maybe) need to be owned by the user that you want it to run as. So to make things simpler (the powers that be) added Xwrapper to the mix which does the suid root before calling X so the ownership issues go away. A way to see this explicitly would be to write an xdm/gdm replacement. Or if you run solaris on a sparc install opie. opie replaces login, but doesn't 100% get the permissions thing right. Eric