Ubuntu
gedit package

  1. Bug #1449748
  2. Comment #5

Comment 5 for bug 1449748

Revision history for this message
Phil Wolff (adiabat) wrote :

Yes, I just found a workaround yesterday.

I discovered that root is handed a definition of the environment variable XAUTHORITY that points to a non-existent directory:

    root@login:~# echo $XAUTHORITY
    /tmp/libgksu-OgwC1o/.Xauthority
    root@login:~# ls $XAUTHORITY
    ls: cannot access /tmp/libgksu-OgwC1o/.Xauthority: No such file or directory

 This makes it impossible to run any GUI-based program as root.

I worked around this by adding the following to root's .bashrc file:

    export XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority
    cp /home/<myhome>/.Xauthority $XAUTHORITY

It would appear that libgksu is the source of this problem.