Matthew green wrote (in his message from Mon 22)
 > 
 > (ps, is this to get around some lossage on the i386  ?  :-)

Yes. root is basically needed to get access to i/o operations on the
VGA cards. This is very difficult to suppress. It would mean:

1. Write a device driver for each different graphic board on the
   market (it should probably implement the mi level of the Xserver to
   be safe)
2. Have XFree86 (and the other available servers) use them.


					Matthieu