Anyone who runs Linux regularly will know the sudo or su commands well. The first will let you run commands and applications with root privileges, while still retaining the more common environment variables like $HOME. The benefit of sudo is that you only need to supply your own password, and not the root password. The su command does much the same thing, except that it requires the root password. The su – command will drop you into shell that has all of roots environment variable set.
These commands are great, but they have to be run from the terminal. So what if you want to run a file browser or something similar with root permissions? Traditionally the gksu application provided a GUI front end to su, but a decision was made quite some time ago not to include this with Fedora.
By: Matthew Casperson
Leave a Reply