ptrace, pokerstars and Ubuntu 10.10

[Michael Fox]

Hi all,

There's a problem running wine under the new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick).
They have enabled kernel security to prevent processes from using
ptrace. This affects any wine programs which use ptrace which is
surprisingly common. For example I found this bug because PokerStars
wouldn't connect to the network.

I have filed this as a bug with Ubuntu, but they might choose not to
fix it depending on how committed they are to this new security
measure. It is filed as:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.2/+bug/636278

There is a simple workaround and it is to add the ptrace capability to
wineserver using the command:

sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/wineserver

I tried to submit this as a bug for wine, but it was closed because
the maintainer felt there was nothing the wine people could do about
the way Ubuntu sets their security. I would like to make the following
suggestions:

1. Add a winetricks trick to fix wine on Maverick by executing: "sudo
apt-get install setcap; sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip
/usr/bin/wineserver"

2. Add an error message in wine when ptrace fails with error EPERM.
This message should suggest the winetrick so the user will find it
quickly. In my case it took quite a while to figure out exactly what
was going wrong because there is no more terminal output when ptrace
fails than when it succeeds.



-- 

-
Michael