[Xastir] re-making Xastir w/shapelib & imageMagick

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:

> Orrin Winton wrote:
> > On my Linux box (which is what i really need to get
> > upgraded to shapelib & ImMagick), i find that somehow 
> > i ended up having the following:
> > 
> > ~/xastir
> > 
> > In other words, not ~/src/xastir.  In fact, i can't
> > find any readme info that definitely states i should
> > have ~/src/xastir.  (As i state above, the win32 readme
> > DOES in fact say to make it ~/src/xastir, but as far
> > as i could tell, Linux users are not told to create 
> > the ~/src directory.)

The README.win32 file had explicit paths and such so that the Windows
users could just blindly type things and not have to make choices
during the install.

Unix/Linux/MacOSX users can make their own choices as to where to put
things, so it's not all spelled out in the INSTALL file.


> > Also, will running as root all the time, while
> > installing and while operating, cause a problem?
> > (Other than i'm risking trashing my system, right?)
> 
> The probability of trashing your system is high.  Run it as a user.  Get 
> Curt to repeat the incantation for the devices (I can't ever remember 
> them since I haven't had to invoke them in *YEARS* (OK, months...). 
> It's that stable.

I _never_ run as root.  That has man implications, just one of which
is that it is easy to trash your system.  Another big one is that if
a security hole is found in Xastir and an exploit is then created for
it, the remote user might gain root access to your system instead of
the much less useful regular user access.

What I do is become root, do the "make install" or "make
install-strip" thing, then type "chmod 4555 /usr/local/bin/xastir".
That will allow Xastir to run as root when it needs to, but then it
drops priviledges to normal user priviledges the rest of the time.
I really only need to do the chmod stuff in order to access the AX.25
kernel networking functions.  I think everything else can be handled
as a normal user.  You might have to change your permissions on your
serial ports to group Read/Write and then add that particular user to
the group that has access to those ports as well.

Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"