Starting applications as a different non-root user (kdesu -u) does not work after upgrade to Gutsy

[Tvrtko Ursulin]

Basically as the summary says. After last night's upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy I can't run applications as non-root using kdesu(do) any more. This is what I get instead:

tvrtko@sol:~$ kdesudo -u skype skype
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib:
No protocol specified

There was a couple of similar bug reports but all were either too old or unresolved.

[jeroenl (jeroenl)]

I can confirm this. Very very critical.

See also Bug #144722.

[Gregor Müllegger (gregor-muellegger)]

I also confirm this. Reinstalled my system today with the Gutsy Beta.

I tried to solve this problem by using kdesu instead of kdesudo but i cannot find it in the repository anymore.

[Anthony Mercatante (tonio)]

kdesudo with -u option calls sudo -u instead.
What is the result of a sudo -u skype skype ?
If that doesn't work, it's either a bug in sudo or a problem in your sudo installation.
If it does work, then it is a kdesudo specific bug, which I doubt, as kdesudo only wraps commands to sudo in the first place.
The reason it did work before is that kdesu (original) didn't really use sudo, which was good in your case, bug caused LOTS of other problems...

kdesu isn't in the repos, as it is part of kdelibs.

Kdesudo package diverts kdesu to kdesudo, so simply uninstalling the kdesudo package will bring you back to the original kdesu. That can be a workarround in your case.

[Tvrtko Ursulin (tvrtko)]

Uninstalling kdesudo actually helped, thanks!

As a data point sudo -u skype skype didn't work with the X authorisation
error. I don't understand how it is all setup but I am glad I got the old
behaviour back. Thanks again!

[jeroenl (jeroenl)]

I can say same as Tvrtko. Uninstalling kdesudo is indeed a workaround. Please notify me when this will be fixed, so I can reinstall kdesudo and try it again.

[Anthony Mercatante (tonio)]

Well imho this just looks like a sudo and not a kdesudo problem...

[Gregor Müllegger (gregor-muellegger)]

I found for me the following solution:

There is only a symbolic link from /usr/bin/kdesu -> /usr/bin/kdesudo though you can use the following two commands to use kdesu as expected:

sudo rm /usr/bin/kdesu # removing the symbolic link
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/kdesu.distrib /usr/bin/kdesu # creating new symbolic link

So you can use kdesu AND kdesudo as you expect it.

[Mario Young (mayeco)]

Take a look to the bug #155032

Thank you!

[Mario Young (mayeco)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 155032, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.