root trying to open flashplayer in KDE getting cannot open display

I’m new to this forum - and only been doing linux for more than a Samba server for about a year - so VERY green. We have a digital signage appliance built on SUSE 11.3 with a LAMP server that uses the flashplayer application to play a .swf file from localhost. It is a AOpen GP7A mini pc that has the nVidia drivers loaded. We have lots of customers that have been running the exact same system for over 6 months (we image the drive for each sale).

For some reason, my last customer is seeing the following problem shown below, and this linux configuration is way over my head. Everything else is working (local LAMP server is working, communicating with our production servers to get information works, etc). I have verified that it is screen 0 that is running (at least it shows with Ctrl-Alt-F7). I thought that it may have occurred because of updating the software with zypper up. I had the customer rebuild from the image being careful not to upgrade the software. The result was the same. The pc is a newer version compared to my bench pc, but there are multiple other customers running that same version just fine. So I am not sure if it is

The command is issued by a php script that is run in a root cron job. As I said, it works great on all other customer pc’s including my bench system. I also tried to execute the command on a ssh terminal as the root user with the same result. I also upgraded my bench pc and it still worked properly.

The command being executed is sudo env DISPLAY=:0 XAUTHORITY=/home/svision/.Xauthority flashplayer http://localhost/flash/sign.swf &

the result (when run in terminal) is:
No protocol specified
(flashplayer:15077): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

If anyone has any thoughts on how I could get past this, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks and hope you all have a great weekend.

I’m not sure whether this is relevant. However, I found that I needed to also set $XAUTHLOCALHOSTNAME in the root shell environment, to start an X program. Check in a shell from your normal login, to see what the value should be.

I did notice that the server name had changed. For some reason, the NIC cards sometimes have to be added again - even though the nic is the same model, but a different mac address and pc. That is probably how it gets changed. So that could cause the issue?