Hi,
Can someone tell me how to grant a non root user access to the yast2 GUI in SUSE 9 to administer user accounts. I have already set up a user and grant sudo access to /sbin/yast2. This works fine for the text yast version but not
GUI version.
Thanks in advance
That is because sudo is a command line option; it won’t affect GUI operation. To the best of my knowledge there is no GUI option. On the assumption that someone using sudo knows what they are doing, this also helps to prevent naive users from doing silly things.
I am not sure about SUSE 9, but the same problem happens in all recent versions of openSUSE anyway. Here is a solution I found today. It involves disabling the access control of Xorg, which is a security weakness, so don’t forget the last part, which re-enables the access control:
xhost +; sudo -E /sbin/yast2; xhost -
Im not sure if this is even possible…but if you are able to give them access to the user admin tool, what prevents this non root user from adding himself to the “root” group (can you even do that–add a regular user to the “root” group?)
the simplest way to execute a GUI app as root is to use the kdesu command (i.e. kdesu /sbin/yast2
In its default configuration, kdesu will ask for the root password. This is somewhat of a conflict of interest if you have sudo set up.
to make kdesu work with sudo, you have to edit the following file (or create it if it does not exist)
/opt/kde3/share/config/kdesurc
change that file to read the following:
[super-user-command]
super-user-command=sudo
the next time you run kdesu it will ask you for the user’s password, not root’s.
This is really useful.
Thanks for the hint.
no problem