[SOVLED] /.cache/qt_compose_cache_little_endian

[squirrelsoup]

/.cache/qt_compose_cache_little_endian_cefa3bd948463b1f4a4d8ed85892fcef

keeps getting placed on my box even though i keep deleting it, does anyone knows what it is?

[khayyam]

[Ant P.]

Looks like a sign that you're running heavy GUI apps as root. Why?

[squirrelsoup]

am i running heavy GUI as root? how can i know?

[Hu]

Either your permissions on / are too permissive or you are running a Qt program as root. Either way, something is wrong. You should never run Qt (or GTK+ or ...) GUI applications as root.

[squirrelsoup]

i have no idea on how to solve this,

[squirrelsoup]

i followed this handbook: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Non_root_Xorg
does that mean i was running X as root all the time?
additional questions:
is it really necessary to set quotas on the disk in order to maintain a secure system?
is it really necessary to set file permissions, or is it already set o.k by default after installing Gentoo following the handbook?

[Ant P.]

I don't know who would tell you such idiotic ideas, but they're wrong. Gentoo is already secure and hitting random parts with a sledgehammer won't magically make it better.

[ct85711]

In general, you should only use root when necessary, otherwise the majority of the time you use a regular user account. In a terminal, there is a big difference if you have a # or a $, the later indicates you are a regular user. Another easy test, is where your user's home directory is at. For regular users, they are usually in /home/... where the root's home directory is /root/. By default, a user can NOT view/modify another user's home folder (you shouldn't even be able to cd into it).

Note: Your terminal prompt could always be changed, but that is up to you to figure out.

Quotas are used for when you want to restrict how much storage space a user is taking up (so they don't hog your hard drive), for a single user it's of little concern. File permissions in general is set so one user is unable to modify another's file. Most times, a regular user only has enough permissions to write in a few locations, the temp folder (which is often cleaned out regularly) and their home directory. There can be other locations too, but that is depending out your setup and configuration.

Note: Doing cd ~ can be a quick way to get to your home directory, otherwise using pwd can help identify what directory you are in.

[Leio]

It is more secure to run Xorg without root privileges with USE=-suid on xorg-server as discussed on that wiki page, if possible with your hardware and drivers.
But Xorg running as root doesn't meant that anything else does that, as the clients that connect to that X server (including session manager and so on) shouldn't be running as root, and Xorg definitely isn't what's creating some cache entries to your /.
_________________
GNOME team lead; GStreamer; MIPS/ARM64

[squirrelsoup]

ok, if i understand correctly, then i will leave quota's and file permissions as default.
however if root xorg not caused the cache file, what could have caused it? maybe virtualbox?

[Hu]

Considering the name of the file, I think it is fair to assume that whatever created the file was run by root and uses Qt. What GUI programs have you been running as root and why? The only GUI programs that should run as root at all (and there are people who will argue even this one) are the GUI wrappers for certain system administration tasks. Virtualbox, browsers, mail clients, etc. should all be run as your user, not as root.

[khayyam]

squirrelsoup ...

whatever is writing it has $XDG_CACHE_HOME set to '/.cache/' ... which is unusual as generally this is set to $HOME/.cache (unless redefined to point elsewhere). So even though root has permissions to write that file, the location doesn't seem to match would would normally happen with such things. That leads me to think that whatever is run doesn't have the env of root (but none the less can write to '/').

You should check the above variable in both root, and user(s), and its probably a good idea to see what the permissions of '/' are:

[squirrelsoup]

i did a reinstall and the cache file did not return.
check on /

[squirrelsoup]

[khayyam]

[squirrelsoup]

thank you all