Comment 4 for bug 157748

FYI, I think this used to work okay in 10.04, but fails in exactly the same way as described above in 12.04.

Note, in 10.04, X was started by gdm and was passed a -auth argument that looked like this:
/var/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm-??????/database
when a user would log in, their XAUTHORITY environment variable was set to point to this same file.

On 12.04, X is started by lightdm with a -auth flag that looks like this:
/var/run/lightdm/root/:0
and when a user logs in, their XAUTHORITY environment variable points to /path/to/home/.Xauthority.

Obviously, in a NFS environment root on a local workstation doesn't have access to the user's home directory, causing the problem.

With gdm, there appeared to be code in /etc/gdm/Init/Default to handle setting the XAUTHORITY variable, and presumably gdm knew how to change the ownership of the database file to the appropriate user when they logged in. lightdm doesn't appear to be as smart as gdm. :-(

I added the following code to my .bashrc file, which seems to work around the problem:
# try to work around Ubuntu 12.04 XAUTHORITY settings
# are we on the console *and* running lightdm *and* root?
if [ `id -u` -eq 0 ]; then
  if [ "$XAUTHORITY" == "$HOME/.Xauthority" ]; then
    if [ "$DISPLAY" == ":0" ]; then
      x_cmd=`ps guaxww | grep /usr/bin/X | grep -v grep`
      case "$x_cmd" in
        *lightdm*)
          XAUTHORITY=`echo $x_cmd | sed -e 's/^.*-auth //' | awk '{print $1}'`
          export XAUTHORITY
          ;;
      esac
    fi
  fi
fi

but it only works for interactive shells, so if I do "sudo bash" and then run X programs, I'm good, but if I do "sudo xprogram", then it still doesn't work.