sudo/oassword promt for administrative tasks in Gnome

Ryan83518 · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

I started off using Gentoo about 4 years ago. MOved away from using linux for a while, then over a year ago started using it again but started using Ubuntu. Well since using Ubuntu I've been really happy with the desktop experience, but not a whole lot else. Last week I went ahead and installed gentoo on my laptop and so far things are pretty good. After my third attempt at an install I've got nearly everything working, xorg, gnome, wireless, my touchpad, networking, yada yada. All is good except for the desktop experience when I need to run something as root. I'd like to run those things using sudo, basically using the administration setup that ubuntu uses. If a program needs administrative access, I'd like a prompt like I had in Ubuntu to ask for my password so I can complete the task at hand instead of opening a terminal, and either running sudo from there, or dropping to root and running the app from there.

I'm wondering if there is a guide on how to set such a thing up in Gentoo, or any Gnome desktop for that matter. Any point in the right direction would be helpful as this has been driving me crazy for days and slowing me down on getting things up and running (not really because I can't live without that functionality, but it would be nice to have).

jho · Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 9:04 pm Post subject:

I believe it can be done with a program called gksu (or kdesu for KDE..).
Install it and then run any command with gksu. For example:

Ryan83518 · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

ok thanks man. i knew about using that command for accessing graphical programs as root but just not how to get programs in gnome to work like that. turns out i just have to edit the properties of the menu item for each application or command in the menu i want to prompt me for a password. a little bit of extra work but thats gentoo.