PDA

View Full Version : Why gksu and gksudo?



DaveBorealis
October 29th, 2006, 04:09 AM
What's the advantage of using gksu/gksudo over su/sudo, such as in:
gksu "update-manager -c"

All it seems to is use a dialog box to ask for a password, rather than asking for it in the same terminal that one had to use to launch the gk* command in the first place.

Am I missing something?

Best regards,
Dave

taurus
October 29th, 2006, 04:14 AM
Here you go, from one of the staff members...

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/graphicalsudo

ComplexNumber
October 29th, 2006, 04:41 AM
it only seems to be necessary on ubuntu.

DaveBorealis
October 29th, 2006, 04:52 AM
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/graphicalsudo

Ah...I get it now. su/sudo for CLI commands, and gksu/gksudo for running GUI applications (launched from the command line).

Thanks!
Dave

glotz
October 29th, 2006, 05:04 AM
Now since we got the sudo versus gksudo issue solved, there's a vaguely similar relation between su and sudo (and prolly gksu and gksudo), see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo#head-a76e0b38808fca380fa209babb080d60ffe0ec8e Bullet 1.

(what a beautiful URL by the way..!)

DaveBorealis
October 29th, 2006, 05:39 AM
Now since we got the sudo versus gksudo issue solved, there's a vaguely similar relation between su and sudo (and prolly gksu and gksudo)

This thread has potential to start a flame war, yet!

glotz
October 29th, 2006, 05:40 AM
:lol: :evil: :lol:

taurus
October 29th, 2006, 07:18 AM
This thread has potential to start a flame war, yet!
Don't worry. We have buckets of water here so it's not going to start and if it does, it's not going to go too far... :twisted:

aysiu
October 29th, 2006, 08:29 AM
Actually, the page on graphical sudo outlines the differences between sudo and gksudo, but it doesn't explain the differences between gksu and gksudo.

Does anyone know the difference between those two?

taurus
October 29th, 2006, 08:41 AM
I always thought that su is a terminal command while gksu is a graphical of su. On the other hand, sudo is CLI while gksudo is GUI of sudo!!!

DaveBorealis
October 29th, 2006, 02:46 PM
Don't worry. We have buckets of water here so it's not going to start and if it does, it's not going to go too far... :twisted:

Hey just 'cause **** Cheney says water dunking bad guys is a no brainer...

(Besides...I'm not really bad, just misunderstood!)

wieman01
November 15th, 2006, 04:03 PM
Actually... One point mentioned on the site is incorrect: You can run...

sudo kate
...by all means. Doing it all the time. Also the link (...here) on the page is unreachable or broken.

So far I have not found a sufficient explanation as to why someone should use "gksudo" or "kdesu" rather than "sudo". The explanation given on the site is one step in the right direction, but I cannot confirm that from what I have experienced up to now.

Anything else we should know?

wieman01
November 15th, 2006, 04:11 PM
By the way... Using common sense, I would think that the difference between "gksu" and "gksudo" is that the first one is the graphical version of "su root", the latter is the graphical tool to run administrative tasks for the current user (if that user has administrative rights).

Would that make sense?

23meg
November 15th, 2006, 04:16 PM
Actually, the page on graphical sudo outlines the differences between sudo and gksudo, but it doesn't explain the differences between gksu and gksudo.

Does anyone know the difference between those two?

Go to apps/gksu in gconf-editor and you'll see that gksu defaults to using sudo in Ubuntu anyway, so there's no difference. If you uncheck the sudo-mode box, you should be able to enter your password only once per session when running administrative graphical apps, if you've enabled the root account.