Bug#297972: GKSu locks KDE; cannot be dismissed, only killed

Thomas Rast Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>, 297972@bugs.debian.org
Thu, 03 Mar 2005 20:13:36 +0100


Package: gksu
Version: 1.2.3-2

I've seen various bug reports of GKSu hiding between other windows,
seeming to lock X, but still reacting to ESC; I've also had this
before.  However I think this one is new.  My apologies if it's not.

Here's what I do:

- Run 'gksu synaptic' in a Konsole (I'd use the KDE menu but I
  immediately switched over to kdesu when this happened the first
  time, see below)

- Immediately start switching windows with the KasBar

- As soon as GKSu grabs X, KDE will freeze without showing the GKSu
  window (judging from the bug reports this is a known problem)

- After some time, the GKSu window will show up; however it does *not*
  have the focus, and I haven't managed to dismiss it in any way.

- The first time this happened, neither Ctrl-Alt-F1 nor
  Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (!) allowed me to get out of this predicament.
  Unfortunately I cannot reproduce this; you'll have to trust me ;-)
  Of course with Ctrl-Alt-F1 working, you can just kill the gksu
  process from the linux console and remove the lock file.  I suppose
  a running SSH server would have saved me too.

Not sure what you can do about this, as I'm not into X programming.
Maybe GKSu could somehow detect that it lost focus (which as far as I
can see should never happen) and quit with an error message?

Some relevant versions:

ii  gksu           1.2.3-2        graphical frontend to su
ii  libgksu1.2-0   1.2.5a-1       library providing su and sudo functionality
ii  libgksuui1.0-0 1.0.3-2        a graphical fronted to su library
ii  kdebase        3.3.2-1        KDE Base metapackage
ii  x-window-syste 4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 X Window System core components

Greetings
Thomas

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