Gnome SuperUser

Gnome SuperUser is a gtk frontend to su and as such an easy way to run a program as root in the Gnome environment. It is based on xsu by Philip Van Hoof and is now maintained by Mark Finlay.

Note from Philip Van Hoof: As Mark Finlay passed away on January 9 2004, I am again maintainer of this little project. I am not planning any major changes in a near future but I am willing to again transfer the maintainer status to people with such plans.

I would like to thank Mark Finlay for his work on Gnome SuperUser. May he rest in peace.

Gnome SuperUser in action

FAQ

Can you add a "remember this password" checkbox
No. to add a feature like that without introducing major security problems would require writing a whole "system" and I only want to write a small utility application.

Why don't you integrate this with the run dialog and/or nautilus
I have discussed with the gnome desktop hackers whether we should include Gnome SuperUser with Gnome and it was decided that it is best kept as a sepporate application. Software included with the Gnome Desktop has to be very portable and not all of it's supported platforms include su. A totally sepporate portable authentication system is being worked on for Gnome in the future. But it's not ready yet so I'm providing this application as a stop-gap for Linux users. If you want to request better integration of authentication with Gnome I'm not the one to talk to.

With that said, I am thinking about using the nautilus context menu or a nautilus script to integrate my utility a bit. If anyone has any ideas related to this e-mail me at sisob@eircom.net.

There is already [program X] that does what this program does...
Yeah, whatever. I wanted to create my own one. People say that it is better not to waste time on two or three sepporate projects. Gnomesu is such a small program really. Trying to merge it with anything would not be worth my while. I will however concider feature requests based on features in similar programs.

But doesn't su stand for 'Switch User'?
Yup, and gnomesu will let you run a program as any user. But it's most common use is to run programs as root so it's called Gnome SuperUser.

Have you thought about adding sudo support?
Yes and I won't - that would just be a totally different appliation.

But my Redhat 8.0 already asks me for my root password
Yeah but what about the rest of the linnx world? Also if you install a non-redhat8 appliaction that you want to run as root then gnomesu is your only man.

Getting Gnome SuperUser

The latest tarballs are avaliable on sourceforge in the gnomesu section.

To checkout development code from cvs:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xsu login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xsu co xsu2

Warning: Do not use in a production environment. This is development code and as such has not be security audited.

Helping Out

There is a TODO file with a list of things that need to be done. Some of which I am not a good
enough programmer to accomplish. So I'd love any help that anyone want's to give me. If you want to choose something off the list please e-mail me first to make sure that I am not already working on it.

Please only submit patches made with 'cvs diff -b'.

Contact Me

Mark Finlay, sisob@eircom.net

Note from Philip Van Hoof
I don't know whether or not the family of Mark is routing E-mail messages to the correct destinations (if you don't know why they could be doing this, see at the top of this document for an explanation). But lets not make it harder for them. Questions regarding Gnome Xsu and/or Gnome SuperUser should be send to Philip Van Hoof: me at freax dot org