"conversation with su failed" message unhelpful

[Mark Stosberg]

Binary package hint: kdeadmin

This happened on Edgy:

1. Log into an account that is not in the "admin" group.
2. Try to run adept.
3. Enter correct password.
4. Witness mysterious, unhelpful result: "Conversation with su failed"

I'm a very experienced Linux user, and this message gave me no idea what the problem was.

A much better behavior would be to not even ask for the password, but immediately notice the user is not an administrator, and report: "You must be administrator to run this application.", and if possible, offer to run the application in unprivileged mode, as Adept can do.

You can see other users have struggled with this poor wording here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=116514

A search on Google for "Conversation with su failed" turns up even more users confused by the message.

  Mark

[Rich Johnson (nixternal)]

Is this issue still occurring? I am unable to test this at this time, but as soon as I get to my test machine I will go ahead and try to reproduce it. Thanks!

[Rich Johnson (nixternal)]

Hi Mark,

I am going to mark this as fixed released as the wording to the warning message has changed to let the user know they don't have the rights necessary to do what it is they are trying to do. If you feel this is still an issue in any of the latest releases, I urge you to reopen this report. Thanks!