[ltp] R51 - OSD not working

[Daniel Stodden]

On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 21:45 +0000, Florian Dorpmueller wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I am running debian sarge with Kernel 2.6.11.
> 
> tpb and xosd-bin is installed but I receive no OSD messages when I change 
> something (volume, brightness).
> 
> When I tap "tpb -v" I receive:
> "xosd kann nicht initialisiert werden. Keine Bildschirmanzeige möglich." 
> which means that xosd is not able to be initialized and OSD is not possible.
> 
> Has anybody an idea how to activate my OSD?

tpb needs access to the nvram device /dev/nvram on your system.

as noted by others above, the user running the process needs X11 access
at the same time. root usually cannot access your X server without
forcibly importing you .Xauthority contents.

anyway, i'd suggest generally not running tpb as root, but as a regular
user.

look at /dev/nvram and whether it is bound to a dedicated group.
if it's not, create a new group 'nvram', then set up /dev/nvram with
chmod/chgrp as follows:

crw-rw----  1 root nvram 10, 144 2005-04-07 16:21 /dev/nvram

so group nvram, besides root, can access the device as well.

then set /usr/bin/tpb sgid nvram:
chgrp nvram /usr/bin/tpb
chmod g+s /usr/bin/tpb

should look as follows:
-rwxr-sr-x  1 root nvram 36888 2005-02-16 14:47 /usr/bin/tpb

this enables any user on your system to run tpb (exclusively [1]) with
effective GID set to nvram.

an alternative would have be to to just put yourself into the nvram
group.

hth.

regards,
daniel

[1] tpb exclusively, except for the fact that it's probably easy for
users to gain unauthorized access to the nvram device simply through a
modified tpbrc.