No way to "open" files/directories with administrative rights in Nautilus

[Boris Toloknov]

Absence of "Run As" in Nautilus makes it difficult to do many tasks especially for newbies. nautilus-gksu allows to "open" files with administrative rights but it's not installed initially. The easiest way to "open" files with administrative rights without nautilus-gksu is to run sudo nautilus from the console. However:
1) How does a newbie know that he/she should run sudo nautilus ?
2) I spent a lot of time looking for "Run As" or some other way to do administrative open through the menu.
3) Typically I: 1) find the file in the tree, 2) try to open it, 3) get an error, 4) open a terminal, 5) sudo nautilus, 6) find the file in the tree again and open it. It feels annoying.
4) A newbie could install nautilus-gksu ? How does he/she find that out ?

[Paul Hoell (hoellp)]

There is a menu entry for nautilus with admin rights in the gnome menu, but it's hidden by default. This wouldn't fix the problem but could dampen it a bit. I'd still prefer to install nautilus-gksu by default and/or spend nautilus a dialog similar to kde's GetHotNewStuff which shows all nautilus extensions and install them quickly.

[Tralalalala (tralalalala)]

"The easiest way to "open" files with administrative rights without nautilus-gksu is to run sudo nautilus from the console."

The right command isn't "sudo nautilus", but "gksu nautilus", as Nautilus isn't a text-based application, but a graphical application.

Ontopic:
I'd also want to have this functionallity by default. The same goes for applications. I'd be nice to be able to right click (or left click for left handed people) on Gedit from the Applications menu and start is as root, so you'd be able to type some text and save it wherever you want to save it. Another example: Do a secundairy click on NVIDIA X Server Settings and start it as root, so you'd be able to save the settings to xorg.conf.

Why should someone have to enter the command line or Alt+F2 to run as something as root?

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Possibly related: Bug #389847

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.