Re: [gentoo-user] Re: X programs as root

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Yohan Pereira wrote:
> On Saturday 25 September 2010 8:33:09 am Dale wrote:
>    
>> Well, I don't really know what it is using.  I just set up the menu item
>> to run the program as root.
>>      
> i assume you mean you setup a menuitem to run a paticular application as root
> like say to run konsole/konqueror as root.
>
>    
>> I don't know if it uses su -, kdesu, sudo
>>      
> if its a menu item then it has to use kdesu, because sudo and su both take the
> password from teh std input (you wont get a gui prompt to enter the password),
> and nothing will happen. all you have to do is fire up the menu editor, go to
> your menu entry and make sure the command field looks like this "kdesu
> konsole", if it does look like that , try running kdesu from a konsole session
> and see what it prints out (it may not be installed for starters).
>
>    

You are assuming correctly above.  The way I have always had to set this 
up is like this.  Set up the menu item like I would with any other 
user.  In the Advanced tab, I set it to run as user root.  When I then 
select to run the item from the menu, a little GUI window will pop up 
and ask me for the root password.  This has worked in KDE3 for ages and 
I don't recall having any trouble with it all.  KDE4 has been changing 
things around and I have had to rework things a couple times as KDE4 
seems to keep changing the way things work.

I suspect you may be right, that it uses kdesu.  Just to make sure it 
wasn't a wrong version installed, this is what I have:

root@smoker / # equery list -p kdesu
  * Searching for kdesu ...
[-P-] [  ] kde-base/kdesu-4.4.5:4.4
[IP-] [  ] kde-base/kdesu-4.5.1:4.5
root@smoker / #

So, I do have the latest at least.  I'll try to re-emerge it although I 
think I already did that once.  I know I tried re-emerging some other 
packages trying to get this to work again.

What gets me, I have Dolphin set up the same way, it works just fine.  I 
can also run Konqueror from a root Konsole and it works fine there.  It 
just doesn't like the menu item for some reason.  I suspect it doesn't 
like kdesu for some reason.  Maybe it's a bug and will be fixed or it 
may be a new "feature".  Who knows.

Dale

:-)  :-)