Possibly other distributions. I've appended the obvious exploit to the end of this. It seems you were right in that if you look hard enough, the root bugs will come your way. Probably Linux specific. Other distributions might be too.
Local users can acquire root status.
It runs suid root. Here's just one. Let's assume the gpm utility is not running. We can't start it up ourselves as gpm is only to be run by root. But gpm might be running already.