Re: Fw: su in X

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@directlink.net>]

Lo, on Wednesday, April 11, Erik van der Meulen did write:

> Dear list, this should be easy, but I have not managed yet...
> I run Gnome desktop as a 'regular' user. If I need to do systemsmanagment, I
> do 'su -' in a terminal to get root access. Only if I need to start an X app
> (just installed red-carper), I get an error:
> 
>   Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
> 
> Can anyone suggest how to avoid this? I recall something with export
> display, but do not get it to work...

Please do read the rest of this thread about access permissions and X
authority, as there are lots of important issues discussed therein, but it
doesn't really have much to do with your immediate problem.

Exporting your display is what you need to do, yes.

For Bourne-derived shells (like bash),  export DISPLAY=:0.0
For C-shell and derivatives,  setenv DISPLAY :0.0

And *then* worry about the X authentication stuff.

Richard