31 March 2014

Slim and Systemd

I just want to drop in a warning from Arch linux documentation:
Warning: Currently SLiM is not fully compatible with Systemd, resulting in
various problems on a second login. See Display manager#Incompatibility with
systemd for an outline of these problems.
I had really experienced such kind of issues after switching from OpenRC to Systemd! Text artifacts in GTK-based applications, SSH keyring issues, system stall on reboot or shutdown is not full list of bugs I got with Slim running under Systemd. All of a sudden I see the Arch docs. Replacing Slim with LightDM fixed all of these issues at a time!

22 March 2014

An alternative to gksudo/kdesudo

The gksudo and kdesudo commands are okay, if we whether work in GNOME or KDE environments, or are satisfied with the number of required dependencies. However, these pacakges are pretty cumbersome, if we want just a lightweight GUI version of sudo, especially on non-GTK/non-KDE environments like Xfce. In this post I'll show a simple GUI front-end I use on my Xfce setup. Steps:
  • Install x11-ssh-askpass or similar.
  • Create ~/bin/xsudo executable with the following contents:
    #!/bin/bash -
    sudo -A $@
      
  • Set the $SUDO_ASKPASS environment variable in some initialization script (e.g. ~/.xinitrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc etc.):
    export SUDO_ASKPASS="/usr/bin/x11-ssh-askpass"
      
    Alternatively, put the following into /etc/sudo.conf file:
    Path askpass /usr/bin/x11-ssh-askpass
      
    (Make sure to adjust the path.)
Now we can use xsudo command just as if it were gksudo or kdesudo.