Binary package hint: gksu
This applies to intrepid.
Not only that the password dialog as normal windows feature looks weird, starting applications as root does fail at the first attempt and the application hangs and needs to be killed. After starting the application again, it works.
As a hint: I use toolbar buttons without labels, but for example when I start synaptic, enter the password in the dialog with a onscreen keyboard like cellwriter keyboard or onboard keyboard, then synaptic appears with labels under the toolbar buttons and then hangs.
So this makes it very anoying to use a program as root with intrepid on a tablet pc, you always have to do start it, kill the app and start it again. Probably it works because you don't have to enter the password again in the second try - so the password is right but somehow the application call is wrong.
Please look into it! It's not a simple ugly layout issue. Thanks!
I can confirm.
In Intrepid, on a Samsung Q1 UMPC (the original Celeron-M 900 version), gksu fails almost every time it runs -- which makes various administrative tasks difficult to perform, obviously.
The Q1 is a keyboard-less tablet "ultra mobile PC." I have "password dialogs as normal windows" enabled in Assistive Technologies because I use an onscreen keyboard (OnBoard).
When running a GUI program that requires root privileges, the password dialog pops up as expected, and I can use the on-screen keyboard to enter the password. Upon pressing "Enter" or "OK", the desktop stops responding normally -- it essentially "freezes up."
After that, I can sometimes launch applications from the Gnome panel, but in most cases those applications will pop up an unresponsive window that takes no input. I can also usually switch focus and raise windows by clicking on them (compiz is the WM, if it matters), but even windows with focus seem essentially frozen to input. The system-monitor applet on my panel continues to run normally, and it does NOT show abnormal CPU usage.
If I continue to click around and mess with windows, eventually even that will stop working, at which point I often have to hard-power-off. Unfortunately, with no keyboard I can't ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X, and if I'm running the Update Manager, an attempt to flick the power button to start a soft shutdown action results in a denial message: "Update Manager has stopped the policy action from taking place."
Rarely, and arbitrarily as far as I can tell, the system is responsive enough that I can start the System Monitor applet and use it to kill the "gksu" process. If I can get that far, the system un-freezes, and normal operation resumes. Even the escalation to "root" persists -- after killing gksu, I can continue to use Synaptic or whatever I was planning to do in the first place.
"sudo" from the command line operates normally -- no problems.
This functionality worked OK in Hardy, and this strange behavior began only after upgrading the distribution to Intrepid.
The foregoing written description is about all I have to offer at this point. I would be happy to help debugging this, but I don't know what other information to provide: running "gksudo" from a terminal window has the same fault, but offers no debugging output.