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Fixing kdesu problems in Kubuntu

There seems to be a bug in kdesu causing problems when using sudo instead of su.

Symptom: When trying to switch to admin mode in one of kcontrol’s (or systemsettings) modules, the process fails and presents you kcontrol’s main window (or the same grayed-out module in systemsettings).

To solve this more elegant than just calling kcontrol manually using kdesu (which actually works), you can do the following:

  • set password for root (sudo passwd)
  • add


    [super-user-command]
    super-user-command=su

    to either

    ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals

    or

    /usr/share/kubuntu-default-settings/kde-profile/default/share/config/kdeglobals

I also posted this to the ubuntu-forums, maybe someone else finds this useful.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 21:39 and is filed under GNU/Linux, KDE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Fixing kdesu problems in Kubuntu”

  1. Charles Says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 8:05

    Thank GOD and you for telling me about this!!. Iv’e been stuffing around with the sudoers file for a week thinking I was doing something wrong. – I knew it had something to with kde just didn’t have a clue where and how to change it. Your a blessing, now I can get back to enjoying kubuntu.

  2. Luke Says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 16:57

    Dude, you are a freakin genious! Thanks for posting this! That kdesu issue was annoying the hell out of me for the longest time.

    The first thing I did after installing kubuntu was to rnable the root password. But I didn’t know about the kdeglobals line. How could the kubuntu testers miss something like a broken kdesu, that can be fixed in 1 line is beyond me.

  3. chimaera Says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 17:26

    Heh, thanks for the positive feedback! I’m pretty amazed that this bug still exits.. I posted this three months ago.

  4. Christopher J. Bottaro Says:
    June 19th, 2006 at 20:02

    Yeah, thanks. I just installed Kubuntu 6.06 and ran into this problem. Your solution worked like a charm…except that kdesu asks for the root password instead of the user’s password (a la sudo). That just a minor annoyance though.

  5. Incorrect Password; Please Try again « touch the sky… down to the earth Says:
    October 27th, 2006 at 3:54

    [...] Seperti di sini , tapi tidak berhasil [...]

  6. Wagner Says:
    March 16th, 2007 at 7:15

    Great!!!!!!!!

  7. marcos Says:
    April 2nd, 2007 at 16:13

    sehr gut!

  8. Kartik Shah Says:
    April 9th, 2008 at 4:17

    I am using Kubuntu Hardy with KDE4. I tried the solution but still I have not been able to get kdesu to work. Are there any other specific changes I need to make for Hardy to make kdesu work

    Thanks a ton.

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