On 2018-05-14 16:56, Joe wrote:
On Sun, 13 May 2018 14:43:55 -0500 If your micro-installation contains them, gksu and gksudo are graphical equivalents of su and sudo. I start Synaptic from a menu entry, which uses gksudo.
gksu is now deprecated as insecure, https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892768 and will not be available in Debian Buster as far as I can see. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gksu&searchon=names&suite=all§ion=allEven on Stretch and (I think) Wheezy, Gparted and Synaptic both shipped .desktop files which caused them to be launched by the policykit alternative, pkexec instead of gksu.
Policykit brings its own complications, but I think it should be possible to create a .pkla file in /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority to allow a certain user, or group member, to perform an action defined in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/* without a password. You could even add a new action if necessary.
See also: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=137326 -- John