Hmm. I've deleted a whole host of messages, so no quoting here, and relying on memory to write this email :)
Yes, xhost + would give the whole world access to his X display. xhost +localhost is much better. However, his error message said: can't connect to XServer: (with no display on the end) This means that either he's logged into one of the consoles, has telnetted (or sshd) into his box, or done a 'su -' to get root privileges (i.e. the DISPLAY environment variable is not set. He probably needs to do a "EXPORT DISPLAY=machinename:0" before running the mandrake update program. Tim Wright Assistant Lecturer Department of Computer Science University of Canterbury http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~tnw13
