Gnome SuperUser



There has been some disussion in the past about having a kdesu[1] style
program for Gnome. Every now and then someone comes along and says that
they are going to program one. There has been gnomesu, gsu, gtksu, xsu
and an attempted port of kdesu to gnome[2].

None of the above projects are being actively maintained and some of
them cannot even be found online anymore. I know that a lot of users
want a (gooey)way to run programs as root easily and I had some time to
spare so I started looking around for some code to use.

A week and a half later i bring you Gnome SuperUser: http://xsu.sf.net
As the url implies it is based on xsu and at the moment I am using xsu's
cvs and sf resources for it's development(thanks to xsu's author: Philip
Van Hoof). I found xsu to be unintuitive and excessively complicated for
what it does so i have simplified it and improved the ui. You can find
instructions for checking out the code from sf cvs, and a screenshot on
the site.

I know that there are a lot of problems with running gtk apps as root
and that it may never be possible to include this sort of program in the
core gnome desktop, but I'd like to think that it has a home somewhere
in the Gnome Software collection, maybe in the fifth toe or hackers'
toys?

Anyway, my plans for this tool are to finish off it's UI and behavior
and to try and make it as secure as is possible. I'd love if I could
continue to hack on it using gnome cvs and bugzilla where it could
receive scrutiny from better hackers than myself, and maybe some i18n
love etc..

Also I would like to hear from people on this list the resons why a gsu
program is not wanted in the gnome desktop so that maybe I can do some
research and see if the situation can be improved.


[1]In case you've never used it it is a little kde program that you run
with the syntax 'kdesu <command>'. It then asks you your root password
ans runs the command as root.
[2]There is also some code in the gnome-system-tools but currently this
is only used to run those tools as root.
-- 
		 .--= [ MArk Finlay - sisob ] =--.

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