There was an interesting thunderstorm last night, sorry about the
delay.

It could be the case that this is in reference to DEV_MEM as defined
in the X src tree.  There were similar errors about not being able to
write to /dev/mem or /dev/xf86 (or xfree86, I don't have the files in
front of me.) 

I discovered through reading a port specific XFree86 faq that kernel
security level > 0 was a suspected culprit.  Documentation is a very
good thing.  Rebuilding the kernel with the INSECURE option, rebooted
and X ran on the new kernel.  I had not found this to be the case on
the sparc, seems to be a feature of the i386 Xserver.  A workaround
was also provided to work with kernel security > 0, I have not yet
tested this.  I needed to update the running system given the new
security warnings anyway.  Could a line about this problem be inserted
into the XFree86 man pages somewhere, so that others might not need to
spend time searching, tracing, and the like (esp. off the local
machine) to address this kind of problem?


			John Towler