> Hi I am running KDE 1.1 and every time I reboot my system and start the
> Xserver I have to go get root and change the set user id of kvt to root
> otherwise no terminal starts. Why does the program 'forgets' that info
> when I reboot?
It's hard to guess without more info; I'm pretty sure that's nonstandard
for kvt. Check your startup scripts for anything that affects the file;
chown and chgrp, for instance, will clear the setuid bit.
There's a 'brute-force' solution that I don't particularly like, but I'll
mention it anyway because it brings up a cool topic. The ext2 filesystem
supports several special attribute bits on files that can affect their
behavior; look at the man pages for chattr(1) and lsattr(1) for more info.
Using chattr, you can set interesting things (completely irrelevant to
this problem) like the 'wipe on delete' bit (zero out the file and write
it back to disk before removing it), and the 'append only' bit (allow only
appends, not normal writes).
The one that might help here is the 'immutable' bit, which prevents a file
from being changed, even by root. Try
chattr +i /opt/kde/bin/kvt
(or wherever you have it installed). That should (probably) prevent
whatever change is causing the setuid bit to be lost. Again, it's a
clumsy method, and you should try to figure out exactly why the problem is
happening in the first place. But if you just want to get it to work,
this should help.
(As an aside, your terminal just fails if kvt doesn't start as root? I
was under the impression it just needed setuid privileges to write to
utmp, but maybe there's some other privileged operation it needs to do.
Are you sure you have access to your X server set up correctly, though?)
Shawn