Admin apps problem [duplicate from General]

**HarrisonNapper** · September 16th, 2009

I have implemented the rather simple work-around for this issue of running everything from the terminal with sudo; however, I had a system crash (long story) and now every time I log in, a crash report pops up on my taskbar. That wouldn't be an issue except that since I can't launch it, it pops up every time I log in. Also, I would like to be able to test out the GUI on ubuntu and see how it works

So, now that I've covered the nature of the problem, here are the symptoms:

When I launch an admin app from the admin menu, it will open the "Starting Administrative Application" window and then close. I have literally copied and pasted the path from the launcher properties into the terminal and the exact same command works. Sometimes. At other times (like just now) I get the following error:

Lock taken by pid: -1. Exiting.

What little information is out there on this tells me that in gksu it works something like

if (pid != 0)
{
g_warning ("Lock taken by pid: %i. Exiting.", pid);
exit (0);
}

(that's from libgksu source) and I have seen other errors reported on older versions of gksu than I have and on different pids than -1.

Furthermore, when I try to run synaptic by typing "synaptic" I get the error "Starting without administrative privileges"; my understanding is that this is common and synaptic should be run with gksu. Finally, let me say in advance that I have added myself to the admin and root groups, deleted the .cache file in my home directory in case it was an issue with stored authentication.

I know that might be tl;dr for a lot of you, I just wanted to make sure I got as much of the basic info out there as possible. Any help would be very much appreciated and thank you all in advance for volunteering your time like you do; it's part of what makes the Ubuntu community a community. For serious.

Some info about my setup:
Dell Studio XPS 1340
Ubuntu Studio Jaunty amd64

**HarrisonNapper** · September 17th, 2009

bump

**3rdalbum** · September 17th, 2009

It sounds to me like "running everything with sudo" and adding yourself to the root group has pretty much borked the security system. I might be wrong; but it sounds like something you've run as 'sudo' has changed the permissions on some crucial per-user files. This is completely theoretical guessing on my part.

I have no idea how to find out what files are wrong and whether it can be fixed. The obvious answer is to reinstall, and try to work inside the security system more in future rather than constantly subvert it. A lot of Linux programs simply don't expect to be run as root with sudo and can't be expected to behave properly when they do; I've not paid any attention to what my programs might do if run with sudo.

The other thing to try is to back up your personal files (not settings) and make a new user account that has access to sudo (has "Administer the System" permission in the Users And Groups program). This new account should, if I'm right, work correctly, and you can copy across your personal files again. Try it.

**HarrisonNapper** · September 17th, 2009

Well, I wouldn't have been running things with sudo if it had been working "out-of-the-box" so to speak, so it's not something I was doing of my own volition. A good suggestion; I shall create a new user and report back. Thank you for offering something up, though; I thought the thread would sit around forever, hehe.