Changing to root in konqi

[James Gray]

On Tue, 30 May 2006 06:41 pm, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 5/30/06, James Gray <james at grayonline.id.au> wrote:
> > Make up your mind - you can't have it both ways :)
> >
> > What you are wanting is a single program to escalate and drop privileges
> > on the fly at the user's prompting.  This is NOT supported in Konquerer
> > (and is non-trivial to implement too!).  You either browse as root
> > (ALT-F2, "kdesu konqueror") or you edit as root as Tez described earlier
> > in this thread.
> >
> > Hope that clears it up :)
> >
> > James
>
> Thanks, I was beginning to think that a program cannot change it's
> privleges on the fly. How, then, does Konsole do it?

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Konsole doesn't - the shell that's running inside Konsole spawns a new process 
with elevated privs.  Think of Konsole as a "container" for running shells 
and CLI programs.

So you start konsole as a normal user, the process tree looks like this:
kdeinit───konsole
             └── bash

Now let's spawn a root shell from bash (sudo -H -s):
kdeinit───konsole
             └── bash
                   └── bash(root shell)

See how it works?  Konsole's privs haven't changed - all that has happened is 
a TOTALLY NEW PROCESS with root privs has been spawned.

Here's something else to ponder, when I start "System Settings" with the time 
and date module as a normal user the process tree looks like this:
kdeinit───systemsettings

Now have a look what happens when I hit the "Administrator Mode" button:
kdeinit───systemsettings───kdesu─┬─kdesu_stub
                                 └─kdesu_stub───kcmshell

All that is happening is that "systemsettings" is launching a TOTALLY NEW 
PROCESS inside it's own window, using kdesu, that has root privs :)

Hope that explains it a little better.  I guess the konqueror developers 
*could* add a "Administrator Mode" button to konqui that does similar magic 
to the system settings module.  Maybe go to "bugs.kde.org" and log a 
wish-list item.  If it gets enough votes, it might be added as a new 
feature :)

Feature requests are an important part of the F/OSS development model.  It's a 
great opportunity for the developers to hear from their own users about what 
they like and don't like.  No wanky "focus groups" behind closed door al la 
M$ and their ilk ;)

Cheers

James
-- 
An apple every eight hours will keep three doctors away.
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