Provide the ability to run a program as administrator

[Charlie]

To run scripts using cuttlefish, it would be advantageous to be able to launch them as administrator. My suggestion would be to include this in the 'Start Application (Advanced)' reflex.

[Alex (noneed4anick)]

Hey Charlie,

thanks for your idea. I have already thought about this and I'm pretty confident that this is a MUST-HAVE feature for cuttlefish. It would be great to start or stop specific services according to the environment. But sadly I absolutely have no clue how to implement this feature.

The problem is that the reaction to the events should happen automatically. But running things as a privileged user is clashing with this idea, because the user has to authenticate himself. Currently there are three available solutions:

1.) passing the command to a SETUID program like sudo or gksudo -- I don't like this, because you need user interaction
2.) passing the command to a SETUID program that acts like sudo but without PAM -- yeah, I'm sure, I don't have to explain why any sane human being would not do that (it's due to security issues ;-) )
3.) Use PolicyKit -- this solution seems to be the best, because as far as I understand it will popup with an authentication window, but you can also create some configs to avoid this.

So obviously I'm heading for solution no. 3, but I haven't found much documentation on policykit yet and I'm not sure how the whole thing is working...

[Charlie (collinslyle)]

Hi Alex,

I have no idea with regards to the technical details of this all, but I have noticed that the program 'Create Launcher' (create-launcher 1.0-0ubuntu1) is capable of creating shortcuts to run a program as administrator. This program is available for free from the software centre, and whilst it is proprietary in nature, you can still view the '*.desktop' files it creates. Maybe this can give you some ideas?

Hope that helps,
Charlie