[gedit-list] giving root permission to start gedit

[Clifford Bergman <cbergman iastate edu>]

Hello all,
I have what I hope is a simple question. Occasionally I find I need to
edit a system file (say, a script in /etc). I am, naturally, logged in
as myself as an ordinary user. So, in a terminal window, I execute 'su'
to become root, and then I use gedit to edit the file. This works,
however gedit fills the terminal window with the same annoying error
message over and over. (Message is at the bottom of this email.) It
seems that I (as ordinary user) have to give root permission to write to
the screen. But I have no idea how to do this. Can someone tell me how,
or point me to the relevant documentation? Is there some new and
preferred way to edit system files?

System: Fedora 13 with gnome, out of the box.

Error message:
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible
causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you
have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See
http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Failed
to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes
include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus
security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the
network connection was broken.)

-- 
Clifford Bergman
Department of Mathematics
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa 50011
515-294-8137