Another reason to prefer a real root over sudo

[Bruce Ferrell]

Chris G wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 10:45:36AM -0600, Jeff Henson wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Jeff Henson <jeff at jhenson.net> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Pierre Frenkiel
>>> <pierre.frenkiel at laposte.net> wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, Robert Parker wrote:
>>>>> You can 'sudo su -'
>>>>   then, X11 doesn't work
>>> You should be able to use 'su -p username'. I'm at work and can't test
>>> it right now though.
>>>
>> Was just able to test it and it doesn't work the way I thought.
>>
> Exactly!  It's a right royal pain.
> 
> The only sane ways to run something like synaptic in this situation
> are (as I see it):-
> 
>     Log out of X and log back in as the sudo privileged user.
> 
>     Have a root account (in which case synaptic asks for the root
>     password rather than the user's password).
> 
>     Do the work on the command line in a terminal (but then it's not
>     synaptic).
> 

This works:

as the first user: xhost +

sudo su -

export DISPLAY=:0

synaptic