Problem with Synaptic and Obmenu

[fvs]

Can't open synaptic or obmenu in terminal with sudo or root?
Can'tfrank@debian:~$ sudo synaptic
No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

(synaptic:1062): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

[Bulkley]

Obmenu shouldn't need root. For Synaptic, use su and when prompted enter your root password. I have this in my Openbox menu:

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gksu -g /usr/sbin/synaptic

The gksu is a box for entering root password.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

^ I think gksu is being phased out in favour of pkexec.

The synaptic.desktop file calls

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synaptic-pkexec

which is a wrapper for

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pkexec synaptic

EDIT: obmenu should not be run as root because it will save the configuration file in /root and won't change your desktop.

[Bulkley]

I think gksu is being phased out in favour of pkexec.

That's interesting. My gksu is working for now but I'll take a look at pkexec.

I often wish that sudo had not been invented. It has its uses but it is badly abused, especially by newbies.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

My gksu is working for now

Yes, it should still work for the foreseeable future.

The problem is that gksu allows the application too many privileges and pkexec is supposed to address this but it does require a special exception file in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/ (which is supplied by the synaptic package) so it won't work for everything.

I often wish that sudo had not been invented. It has its uses but it is badly abused, especially by newbies.

+1

OpenBSD has demoted sudo to the ports tree and moved to doas(1) instead, it's a _much_ cleaner solution

[Head_on_a_Stick]

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Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

Just for the record, this will let you start synaptic with sudo:

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xhost +local:

Don't do it though, it is fundamentally insecure.