[vox-tech] Fwd: Trouble installing Matlab in Debian

[Bill Broadley]

Alex Mandel wrote:
> As far as I can tell xhost+ only lasts for that x-session and can easily

Sure, but it lasts till logout which for many can be weeks, and even a minute
is WAY too long.  Might as well set your root password to "password".  Say you
open another window and type the user or root password.

> be reactivated with xhost-

There is no sane reason to ever do xhost +.  Keystrokes could be sniffed, or
injected.  One might well inject something so quickly that within 1/10 th of a
second they have added a backdoor to your machine and then cleared the screen.
Although it is great fun when a newbie admin does it and you can torture him
with various games/tricks, change his background to something embarassing,
make his cursor unpredictable, xroaches, etc.

> And it is listed in your reference xhost+root, specifying the user never
> worked for me, hence the blanket for all users.

xhost is for hostnames not usernames, so if you must (and you don't) use
xhost +localhost.  Which while bad, is 100x better than xhost +.

> It also appears to be the preferred and most common solution for using
> the oracle installer as it's quick and simple.

Many stupid practices are common, don't assume just because google has a bunch
of hits for something that it's a good idea.  I'd never recommend it to
someone that might not understand the full security implications of doing so.

> Ah yes export DISPLAY=:0.0 is also part of the solution but no most of
> the stuff on the page you reference did not work in my case.

On most machines your DISPLAY will survive a su or a sudo (I just checked on
my desktop), I'd suggest echo $DISPLAY before and after su/sudo to help
troubleshoot.  If remote a echo $DISPLAY before and after a ssh.

> Thanks for the reference of ideas,
> Alex
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