can't run gnome as root - addition

[Tom H]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 5:14 AM, Lentes, Bernd
<bernd.lentes at helmholtz-muenchen.de> wrote:
> Thom wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Lentes, Bernd
>> <bernd.lentes at helmholtz-muenchen.de> wrote:
>>> Luan wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 17:28 +0200, Lentes, Bernd wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Sorry, i forgot: i'm running LTS 64bit.
>>>>
>>>> try:
>>>> $sudo passwd root - to enable root
>>>> and:
>>>> $sudo passwd -l root - to disable root account.
>>>
>>> i did this already. But logging on Gnome using the root account
>>> didn't suceed. After logging on I have a turning wheel for half an
>>> hour, than I gave up.
>>
>> Enabling the root user won't be enough. You're going to have to change
>> LightDM (assuming that this is your DM) preferences and possibly pam
>> preferences too.
>>
>> Why can't you use sudo/gksudo/pkexec as NoOp suggested?
>
> i'd like to use Gnome. Why i don't use sudo ? Because i'm used to
> not use it. I'm using Suse boxes for more than 10 years, and Suse does
> not make this sudo staff. But now i have one piece of software for
> which i get only support running on Ubunto or Centos. I decided für
> Ubuntu. One argument for not logging on as root is the argument, that
> you can easily make heavy errors. Well, i'm not using Ubuntu and Suse
> as a desktop environment, for this purpose i use Windows. So, when i
> log in in a linux box, it's just for administrative purpose. When i'm
> causing trouble, it's my problem. I know that. On my suse boxes, i do
> 95% of my administrative tasks using a shell, not having a DM. But i'm
> new to Ubuntu, so in the beginning it's likely that i want use the DM
> from time to time. When i'm used to Ubuntu, the DM will be
> uninstalled.

I don't know how to enable root GUI login beyond what I said in my
previous post - and that was based on doing so in previous versions of
Debian/Fedora/RHEL/Ubuntu . I doubt that OpenSUSE allows a root GUI
login by default in a GNOME installation since this restriction's an
upstream default so I don't think that you're not re-creating your
OpenSUSE environment by enabling the root GUI login...

However, if you need to launch a GUI app with root privileges, all you
have to do is prepend "gksudo" or "pkexec" to it in Ubuntu (although
I'm not sure how completely pkexec is configured on Ubuntu) or
"pkexec" in Fedora (and at least "pkexec" in OpenSUSE, which I've
never used, since this comes directly from upstream GNOME and PolKit).

If you need to have root privileges in a console or an xterm for
multiple commands, you don't even need to enable root. "sudo -s" is
the same as "su" and "sudo -i" is the same as "su -".