How are you su'ing to root?

If you just do a plain 'su', then you still retain some attributes of the
unprivileged account you came from. For example, whoami will answer
'old_user_name', rather than 'root'.

Running 'su -' will run root's login scripts, etc. and you will appear to
have logged onto the system as root. In this case, whoami will answer 'root'.

I don't know what has changed between redhat 7 and 8, but the behaviour of
'su' may have.

I don't think this is the real reason behind vidix working and VESA not,
but it's worth a try. :)

-----
Chris J.


> Hello all,
> 
> I've just switched from Redhat 7.0 to 8.0, and have run into a problem
> using the VESA driver as root (as a means to output to TV), which worked
> fine with RH7.  
> 
> Typically on RH7, I'd switch over to a text console, log in as root,
> activate TV-Out with the atitvout program, then run mplayer with the
> -vo vesa:vidix option.  This worked beautifully under Redhat 7, but on
> Redhat 8, mplayer tells me that this requires root privileges, even
> though I'm logged in as root.  With RH8, I can be in an X session as a
> normal user, su to root, and successfully invoke xvidix from a command
> line, but never VESA.  With drivers other than VESA, I'm not having any
> problems with any particular format or codec.  (Well, except for that
> pesky Animatrix file, but I've been reading the list, so I know why....)
> 
.....