Re: Can't start X apps from su

[Johan Ehnberg <johan@ehnberg.net>]

Yeah, I got annoyed because of this too. Anyway it's not a big problem. 
What happens when you 'su' is that your env.vars. are changed to root's. 
Thus, apps don't know where the user's X session is. What you can do is 
use the -p flag for su. 'su -p' will preserve the user's env.vars. for 
the invoked su session (or login for 'su -'). Now you can run X apps as 
root.

If I don't remember it completely wrong, at least Redhat and Mandrake do 
this by default, so in those distros you don't have to worry about -p, 
but they might also use some other mechanism. This makes it confusing 
for someone who's used rh or mdk earlier.

hth,
/johan

Andrej Prsa wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> I have a very-difficult-to-reproduce-but-pertaining problem with
> accessing X applications (such as nedit) when gaining access via
> su from some other user's X session. If I log in as root to X,
> such problem never occurs. But as I don't want to take the name
> of root in vain, I got used to using su. *Usually* things work,
> but suddenly, after an indefinite amount of time, it just doesn't
> work any more with the only statement that it cannot connect to
> X session. As a side-effect calling mc from su session becomes
> miraculously black-and-white. If I close all open terminals,
> restart one and go into another session of su, I could sometimes
> regain normal su operation and sometimes not. This has been
> bugging me since I installed Debian (oh, it's 3.0r1 stable), but
> I lived with it until now...
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> Andrej


--
Johan Ehnberg
johan@ehnberg.net
"Windows? No... I don't think so."