Another reason to prefer a real root over sudo

[Chris G]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 09:20:14AM -0800, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
Thanks, it does too, very useful.  I actually needed to do the
following:- 

    xhost +
    su - <sudo privileged user>
    export DISPLAY=:0
    sudo synaptic


That's actually a useful sequence for other sudo/root requiring
applications in certain circumstances.

It's going in my little 'notebook' of useful workarounds.

-- 
Chris Green