Apper problem in Jessie

[rhkramer@gmail.com]

apper on Jessie doesn't work for me:  It starts up, tells me it has packages 
to upgrade, allows me to press the "Apply" button, but does not give me an 
opportunity to enter the root password but tells me that it doesn't have the 
privileges to install those packages.  (apper on Wheezy prompts me for the 
root password after pressing the "apply" button.)

I also made a few (feeble) attempts to run apper as root, but, naturally it 
gave me the ~"no display" message and I didn't try to overcome that.

Is this a known problem, and is there a solution?  (I have been using apt-get 
update and apt-get upgrade to upgrade the system, and I thought maybe a new 
package of apper would be installed to fix the problem, but that hasn't 
happened so far.)

I prefer to use apper.