man vs. kdesu

Juan Carlos Torres carlosdgtorres at gmail.com
Thu Oct 18 08:14:36 UTC 2007


On Thursday 18 October 2007 1:39:37 am Derek Broughton wrote:
> Not really an "added role".  kdesu is just set to request _your_ password,
> instead of the root password - which is consistent with sudo rather than
> su.

True. But kdesu wasn't really made with sudo in mind. iirc, it was a patch 
from Kubuntu that allowed kdesu to use sudo. Notice that kdesu doesn't 
remember passwords for a given time the way sudo does. This is what led to 
kdesudo in Gutsy.

Another "added" role for kdesu in Kubuntu is to prevent messing 
up .ICEauthority and stuff (not sure which files exactly) when you launch GUI 
apps as root. Hence the "use kdesu instead of sudo for GUI apps" rule. AFAIK, 
in other distros, since kdesu uses su by default, it doesn't matter much 
whether you use sudo or kdesu. I might be wrong on this one though. :D

Cheers!




More information about the kubuntu-users mailing list