Bug#712104: Still there with Debian 9.0.0 (stable): "gksu gnome-terminal" (or equivalent root terminal) works only at first launch

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 04 Jul 2017 at 16:40:10 +0000, Walter Irion wrote:
> Trying to start a GNOME terminal window with root privileges either by
> entering "gksu gnome-terminal" in the Alt-F2 starter or by activating
> the root terminal launcher with gnome shell works only at the first
> launch which asks for the root password.

The gksu package (gksu, gksudo commands and the "root terminal"
launcher) should be considered deprecated, and hasn't been touched since
2014. We should probably remove it from Debian before Debian 10.

Running gnome-terminal (or any graphical program, really) as root is not
really something that is supported any more.  gnome-terminal segfaulting
(signal 11) when run like this is clearly a bug and should in principle
be fixed, but it is unlikely to be anyone's highest priority.

Best practice is to run as much as possible (in particular all GUIs)
as an ordinary user, and use sudo, pkexec, su -, ssh root at localhost or
your favourite similar tool to escalate privileges where necessary.

In recent GNOME versions (including Debian 9, I think), you can edit files
that are only accessible by root by asking a GNOME text editor such as
gedit to load a URL like "admin:///etc/hosts". This is better than running
"gksudo gedit" or similar, because it does not run the entire text editor
as root, which is a huge attack surface (and also can't work in a Wayland
environment).

Regards,
    S