[techtalk] Gnome question

[Conor Daly]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 02:30:55PM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Telsa Gwynne thought:
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 02:04:51PM +0100 or thereabouts, BobTFish wrote:
> > At 13:41 15/10/00, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> > >On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 07:46:44AM -0400 or thereabouts, 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
> > >
> > >     o open a terminal (xterm or gnome-terminal). Type 'su -' in it
> > >     and give the root password. The rest of your gnome desktop is
> > >     still guest's. But in that one terminal, you are root, and can
> > >     do root things.
> > >
> > >Unfortunately, you will have to do them at the command line, because
> > >there is currently no way to get a second little panel which has the
> > >programs which only root can use.
> > 
> > A good trick for if you want to run graphical applications as root, but 
> > from a normal user's session is to use ssh.
> 
> I think I was unclear. You get the graphical application fine. But
> you have to invoke it from the command line. You can't use the GNOME
> panel and launchers, because they are still owned by guest and will
> run as guest. So you have to know what the program is called in order
> to be able to start it. And GNOME menus have long names which are
> intended to give you an idea of what the thing does, and do not
> have the command name itself on them. That's what I meant by "do
> them at the command line": _starting_ the app. It comes up as the
> graphical thing. 
> 

Err...

Did the following

cdaly at Hobbiton cdaly]$ su -
Password: 
root at Hobbiton /root]# panel &
[1] 20990
[root at Hobbiton /root]# 
[1]+  Done                    panel
[root at Hobbiton /root]# 

Got told there was a panel running already and said "OK", got my root
panel, fired up a gnome-terminal and linuxconf quite happily.  Then exited
the panel.  Did all this via an X-server on a Windows box and it works on 
the local box also so long as you don't log out the root su where you
started the panel from.  I've done this with other users also where I've
su'ed and started my own panel without logging them out.

If you're going to su to root regularly, you should look at the
bash-prompt-HOWTO for info on setting up your root prompt to look
different.  I have my root prompt as brightred on all machines while
root's X sessions have a bright red background as a gentle reminder not to
do an "rm -rf /*" ! 
:-)

-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)