PAM, X11, and su as a normal user?

[Steven G. Kargl]

Matthew Seaman wrote:
> 
> If all your X sessions are local to you machine (and possibly even if
> they aren't), then try setting the DISPLAY variable to :0.0 -- you'll
> need to repeat the fun'n'games with xauth to match the new $DISPLAY
> setting.

Thanks for the hint.  I took the rather draconian action of
deleting user sgk's .Xauthority file.  Then I used xauth to
merge in user kargl's entire .Xauthority.  This appears to 
work only if I use "su -l sgk".  I guess I'm inheriting
something in the environment that X doesn't lik when I 
use "su sgk".

BTW, I had no problems with this until a few months ago.
At that point in time /etc/pam.d/system was added to PAM.
The cvs log message suggests to me that PAM is somehow
involved because it was stated that a misconfigured
/etc/pam.d/system could have bad effects on login(1) and
su(1).

-- 
Steve
http://troutmask.apl.washington.edu/~kargl/