Comment 5 for bug 356208

As the bloke who entered this bug, I am marking it new. The explanation is below. Maybe it is a bug in some other part of the system, maybe it is not. I'll let someone else make that decision.

(a) The CPU Frequency scaling applet works as expected. You don't need to setuid on cpufreq-selector

(b) The issue I had was as described below.

To reproduce this problem, here are the required steps.

1. Perform an ubuntu installation
2. During the installation, when prompted for the name of the person using the system, provide a name (say user1)
3. After the installation, login as user "user1" and create a new user "user2" who is a "Desktop User"
4. Enable Administrator login (in login window properties)
5. Set a root password
6. Logout as user "user1"
7. Login as root
8. Delete user "user1"
9. Logout as user root
10. Login as user "user2"
11. Add CPU Scaling applet to bar. It will not work.

The reason appears to be that in order to work, the CPU applet (and a whole bunch of other things) attempt to validate that the "Desktop User" is a user who can perform administration. They look for the user who was setup during installation and not finding that user, they don't do anything. But, they also provide no errors, nor do they they attempt to use the "root" user.

This is most likely NOT a gnome-applets bug. Please reassign to the right place.