KDESU

Hi Darrell It, doesn't look like you can respond to archive post that were not delivered directly to your mail box. I hope this kludge I'm making works and you get this post. I am assuming you are using Ubuntu or Debian. For this problem I think they are a lot alike. I am running Ubuntu. When I was a webmaster I kept doing the same thing over and over and got different results every time. <grin> This problem is sorta like that. Slight differences in how you set your system up make this problem give different results for different computers. Yes this is confirmed. Here is what I think is going on from days, weeks, months.... of experimenting and banging my head on the wall. When you kdesu, kdesudo, etc to root you are not using roots copy of Kate you are using yours. Sorta like you do when you use fish or sftp to access a remote computer using xwindows. That means you don't "really" have roots complete environment and if the settings are not exactly right you have all kinds of problems like you mention. You have the permissions to go anywhere and open and write to all files but there are a lot of other "settings" you don't receive the benefits of, like you would as a real root user. I noticed that it seemed like half the configurations were stored in roots config files and half in mine. Kate wasn't bad but Konqueror was a pain to try to use like that. I think the DCOP issue is a case where the DCOP server is seeing some of the signals or request from the root xserver and when it queries Klauncher it goes to root instead of your server--and roots Klauncher is not installed. In fact as little of the Xwindows and KDE software as possible is installed in roots xwindow system. The Root Whackers "had" to leave a place for root to exist--since Linux was basically built around the concept--but they did strip as many of the root environment variables as they could (including all KDE and DBus settings) and yet still have Linux run. For example both KDEHOME AND KDEDIR are not in roots environmental variables. This has caused some problems and caused issues like you had. I think that they will sooner or later break Linux by all the contortions they go through in the code to prevent users from playing with their root. I hope I'm around to laugh at them. <grin> I decided to find a way to run root's version of Kate, Konqueror and kcontrol so I could have control of their environment and configuration files. I did it and it works real well for the regular work you need to do as root. There are still at few weird things here and there that I have not fixed like not being able to run the "Configure Konqueror" application "consistently" without actually logging in as root in a real xwindow session. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. But I am working on it It's nice to finally have my Root applications (run from my xwindow session) that have their own colors, title bar, icons, etc.--which helps keep me from thinking I am in one of my local applications--which usually are also open at the same time. Like you, I'm sure. Also it makes it easier to drop to root on my system then ssh to one of my other computers and run the other computer's root version of a Xwindow application. I also finally figured out how to run an xwindow session as root and that really helped to figure out how to make the local su to root apps work correctly. If you are not against working with the full power of root, (Though not logged in to xwindows as root) I will tell you what I did to solve the problem. The basic idea is that you have to create a root password, fix and export a bunch of environmental variables that were left out, install some missing software, fix some permission issues and finally give yourself permission to use everyone else's xwindow server on that computer (su to root doesn't give you that). After that there are various ways to run the root programs. I prefer su. The icons I use run local scripts that let me setup a lot more options than Klanucher would. Here is the su part of my kate script. su -l -c '/opt/kde3/bin/kate --caption ROOT' root This starts up Kate a LOT faster than using "kdesu kate" from an icon. The only draw back is that I have an extra terminal window open as well as Kate. Hope this helps. Keith