Re: running programs as root in gnome

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

MArk Finlay <sisob eircom net> writes:

> The lack of a kdesu style program for the gnome desktop has been a pain
> for quite a while. But now I'm running redhat 8.0 which has a nice
> little dialog that asks you for a root password.
> 
> Does anyone know if this dialog/program is going to get merged upstream?
> It would make an excellent addition to the Gnome 2.2 or 2.4 desktop.
>
> Does it rely on any redhat deamons or anything nasty like that?
> 
> Also is there a way to access it from the command line?

What you are seeing is the 'consolehelper' facility (part of the
usermode package); it's not very mergeable because it is done in a way
that is very dependent on the PAM (pluggable authentication modules)
system that most Linux distributions use.

'man consolehelper' will give you details of how it works; though
it looks a little incomplete. (Doesn't mention 
/etc/security/console.apps/)

Regards,
                                        Owen