why was this post made invisible ?
I dont use vim, but its obviouse whats happening here, vim is trying to load an X interface.
in other words, a windowed envoronment for you to type in, rather than the bash command line. But X is correctly refusing to talk to the vim program.
This is because X is beeing super paranoid about securety, and only letting one user communicate with it.
when you run as super user, X treats you as a different user.
In theory, someone else on your network could use X to spy on your keystrokes, and see what you are seeing on your screen.
to turn off this security feature, run "xhost +" as the normal user before becoming super user.
anouther solution would be to use a command line text editor such as nano, or emacs. (im pretty sure vim has a command line interface too)
provided that your X server is NOT listening for connections over the network, OR your firewall is blocking outsidfe access to your X server, then there is no risk in running "xhost +"
to test to see if X is listening on the network, run "netstat -npl" and see if Xorg or Xfree86 is listening on port 6000.
or make sure your firewall is not set to allow incomming connections to port 6000.
Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)
