Comment 6 for bug 636278

Binary package hint: wine1.2

Some Windows programs use ptrace pretty unexpectedly. An example is PokerStars.

This program worked fine under Lucid but under Maverick it fails to connect to the servers. The reason for this is a new security "feature" in maverick. The file:

/etc/sysctl.d/10-ptrace.conf

sets

kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 1

This downside of this is that programs like gdb, strace and valgrind cannot attach to processes. This might be okay because the users of these programs will be sophisticated enough to use sysctl if they really need the functionality.

Users of wine are not necessarily sophisticated. They will just see Windows programs that worked in Lucid not working in Maverick and think Maverick sucks.

A work-around for this is to add the capability cap_sys_ptrace to wineserver using the command:

sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/wineserver

I would like to suggest that this command be added to the wine install script. Even though it opens a security hole, I think it is very important for functionality. There is no way for the wine project or for the developers of thousands of Windows applications to fix this.

This should apply to packages wine1.2, wine1.3 and wine-PPA packages. Also wine will have to depend on the package setcap

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: wine1.2 1.2-0ubuntu5
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-20.29-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-20-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Sep 12 03:00:13 2010
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: wine1.2