[techtalk] Gnome question

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 07:46:44AM -0400, Barbara McMillin wrote:
> Oftentimes I find myself in Gnome as guest and I want to change to root. How
> is this done on Gnome desktop? Barbara

There is no way to suddenly change your whole session to behave as if
you have root privileges. This is by design (insert standard speech
about how running as root is, in general, dangerous, etc).

The short answer is: become root in a console window (su) and then
start the application you want/need admin powers for. I'm sorry ... it's
neither intuitive nor convenient, but it's being worked on. 

There has been a lot of discussion amongst Gnome developers about how to
handle applications which require root privileges to do certain things.
The result is best summarised as "no clear consensus". This is partly
because each solution has its own drawbacks.

Hopefully by the time Gnome 2.0 comes out there will be a uniform
solution in place; however, it will still only be a sensible way to run
a particular application as root, since it's too dangerous to wander
around with root powers all the time.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Tredinnick            email: malcolm at commsecure.com.au
CommSecure Pty Ltd