gksudo causes odd cursor behaviour

[Eric D]

Hello, gksudo (I think it's gksudo) is taking control of the whole screen when I
open up an app that requires root priviledges. Opening up Synaptic changes the
cursor to a window resize cursor and locks up the whole screen, except for the
password dialogue box. If another app is opened AFTER gksudo is invoked but
before it appears on screen the other app can appear in front of gksudo and
prevent anything from happening until that app is killed from another console.

e.g. I opened Synaptic and after doing that launched FireFox. FF appeared in
front of the password dialogue and "locked up" GNOME. I randomly killed FireFox
(thinking it had frozen) from a console (sudo killall firefox-bin) and that
allowed the password dialogue to appear.

It seems to me this is a bug with the potential to make other people's lives hell.

[Eric D (eric-dunbar)]

FYI I'm running Hoary (updated today, 9/3/2005 19:39 EST (-05:00 UTC)) on an
Apple Macintosh PowerBook G3/400 "Pismo" PPC, 512 MB RAM.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

The fact that gksudo grabs the keyboard and focus is an intentional security
feature. It should not cause the cursor to behave this way, though (I have seen
this as well, and can reproduce it)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

The cursor bug is fixed (and another race). The problem that gksudo may not stay
in the foreground is bug #13778. I did some research and it really should be
possible to prevent gksudo's focus from beeing stolen (see #7432).