New subject: [trinity-devel] KDESU

25 Feb 2011

...
  Re: KDESU
 From: Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@...>
 Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2010 19:52:20 -0800 (PST) 
...
  Some things I noticed when using kdesu to open Kate.

...
  1. In the password dialog box there was no check box
to remember the
 password. 
...
  2. For my root user I have Kate configured to use a
pink background
 rather than white. That serves as a simple reminder I am working as
 root and not as a normal user. Yet in Trinity, after launching through
 kdesu, Kate did not display the background as pink but white.
 Superficially that seems to indicate Kate inherited the normal user's
 properties rather than root's. 
...
  3. After running kdesu to open Kate, I continually
received DCOP
 error messages of the effect that KLauncher could not be reached via
 DCOP. Basically I had to restart my desktop session thereafter to
 launch apps. 
...
  Comments? Confirmations? 

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