[techtalk] GTK+ Prob - Mandrake 8

[Almut Behrens]

On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 08:14:00PM -0400, Phil Savoie wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
>  Have anyone ever seen this?  How does one create a "helper"
> program to get the x program cdroast to run?
> 
> GTK+WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
> This is not a supported use of GTK+.  You must create a helper
> program instead.  For further details see:  
>         http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html
> 
> Refusing to intialize GTK+
> 
> I went there and looked and just saw a rather snotty page with no info
> on how to do this "helper"  thing.  Any ideas?
> 
> I am using Mandrake 8 and have added the rpm
> xcdroast-0.98alpha8-1.i586.mandrake72.rpm.  The above warning get
> displayed when ran as "root" user or any other ordinary user.

don't know much about Mandrake, but the following note from
http://www.xcdroast.org/  may apply to your problem:

<quote from 11 May 2001's news>
Please note: The non-root mode of X-CD-Roast does not work with GTK+
1.2.9 (or newer) any longer! If you installed that version of GTK you
have to remove the sgid-bit on xcdrgtk (chmod -s /usr/bin/xcdrgtk) and
run as root only. The whole subprocessing of X-CD-Roast must be newly
written to make it working again.
</quote>

I assume you don't want to write your own 'helper' program -- waiting
for the author to fix it is certainly easier ;)
Just in case you are interested: the idea behind the helper program
is to split off the code that needs to run suid-root from the main
GTK+ application to reduce security problems (GTK+ contains many lines
of code, so the probability of a yet unknown security problem in that
code is much higher than that of a tiny specific-purpose suid backend).
The helper program would have to communicate with the main app, e.g.
via unix domain sockets.

HTH,

- Almut