Broken Sudo (graphical sudo, not in terminal)

[Snowingheart]

Hello,

I have an issue whenever I use any program that requires root authorization. For instance, trying to install software via Ubuntu Software Center yields a black "pop-up" prompting for root credentials; after I input them and hit enter, it lags a little and just displays the message: "Sorry, that did not work. Please try again."

Of course my password is correct, otherwise I would not be asking here.

I've read somewhere that there's a gk-sudo and it is useful to circumvent this issue, whenever I know the name of the program I want to use, but I'd rather have the "usual" sudo working and be done with it.

And yeah, usual sudo (as in within terminal) works just fine. It's just the one in the graphical environment that's broken.

Running Ubuntu 12.10 (quantal) 64-bit
Kernel Linux 3.5.0-22 generic
Gnome 3.6.0 (installed via gnome-shell with apt-get)

Any help is appreciated.

[Sin@Sin-Sacrifice]

gksudo should already be installed by default. Try hitting alt-F2 or opening a terminal and typing "gksudo your-command" of course replacing your-command with the command you are actually trying to run.

Edit: I put gtksudo rather than gksudo

[Snowingheart]

Hi, and thanks for the reply.

I had read about that, but the thing I'm looking for is fixing the existing sudo pop-up message. That is, I do not want to use gtksudo <command>, but instead want to fix the screen that pops up asking for my root password.

[bab1]

... I do not want to use gtksudo <command>, but instead want to fix the screen that pops up asking for my root password.

Ubuntu by default never asks for a root password. Rather it, asks for your password to verify that you are a allowed to used sudo for root privileges. This would be for sudo, gksudo and gksu. Are you trying to use the wrong password? Do you have a password for the root account? Have you altered sudo or changed your password?

[Snowingheart]

Bad choice of words, my pardons.

What I meant is that the graphic environment sometimes has to ask for "Administrator authorization" or something like that to run things like installations, disk operations, mounting a specific drive and stuff like that.

That said, in the past it prompted for the "admin" password, which is my user's password, since it is in the admin group, and it let me do whatever the task it was.
Now, that does not work, even though the password is the correct one.

As for the part of enabling a root account, I did, in the past, but disabled it afterwards. I do not know if that might be the issue, since I don't know which of sudo, gksudo or gksu is asking for authorization. And I can't take a screenshot, since it "locks" the screen when asking for that.

[presence1960]

For GUI applications you should issue the gksudo instead of the sudo. Read this

[Snowingheart]

I think that gksudo is used to run an application as root, right?

That's not what I want. I just want to enable some feature of an application that needs admin rights to work.

Here's the screen I'm talking about: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9ml26w8lr...%3A37%3A03.png

And the error message: https://www.dropbox.com/lightbox/hom...%3A43%3A35.png

[bab1]

I think that gksudo is used to run an application as root, right?

That's not what I want. I just want to enable some feature of an application that needs admin rights to work.

Here's the screen I'm talking about: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9ml26w8lr...%3A37%3A03.png

And the error message: https://www.dropbox.com/lightbox/hom...%3A43%3A35.png

Sudo, gksudo and gksu all use the same routines (e.g sudo) This is what the "pop-up" is asking for: sudo authentication. There is no admin rights other than the sudoers group as such. Did you create a user named administrator?

[Snowingheart]

Yeah.. I think I have figured it out. I did enable a root account; that is, the actual user "root" has an entry in passwd. I seem to recall I "disabled" that account just by running passwd and setting an empty password for that user. I'm not quite sure where I read that, but that's what I did.

SO, I think the issue is that the "pop-up" is asking for the actual root user password, and not my-user sudo password...

Thus, I ran passwd again and set a dummy password, re-tested and it works. Thing is, I read that it's not a wise thing to have an actual root user enabled in Ubuntu (for some sort of safety reasons). That said, how could I go about deleting/disabling the existing root account and still being able to authenticate via the "pop-up" window?

[arpanaut]

You would need to lock the root account again not just remove the password.
Take a look at this link and re-lock the root account and the issue "should" correct itself.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/enable-and...-password.html

This is a very old instruction, but I don't think anything has changed since.
HTH