Make a “browse as root” launcher in Ubuntu
August 22nd, 2008
Like Mac OS X, Ubuntu includes by default a privilege escalation system that invokes sudo, which allows certain users (in the admin group) to operate as limited-privileged users for almost all tasks and to temporarily escalate (after a password authentication) to administrative privileges for specific tasks. For more details about sudo, check out the Ubuntu Wiki page on the subject.
Sometimes users want to modify system files and thus need “root” (or full administrative) privileges to make changes to those files. This tutorial will show you how to create an application launcher to “browse as root.”
Right-click on an empty spot on the panel and select Add to Panel
Select Custom Application Launcher and then click Add
The type should be Application and the command should be
The rest of the fields and the icon can be whatever you want them to be.
When you’re done filling in the fields and (optionally) selecting an icon for the launcher, click OK
Now when you click the launcher icon, you’ll be prompted for a password…
and you can browse as root and make changes to system files, all within your otherwise-unprivileged user session.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:44 am
A slightly more intuitive way of doing this is installing the “nautilus-gksu” package from Synaptic. When you next log in, if you right-click a file or a folder you will see the option to “Open as Administrator”.
For folders, this will prompt you for a password with gksudo, and then open a new instance of Nautilus as root, with your folder open. For files, it will prompt for password with gksudo and then run the appropriate program to handle the file; it will run the program as root, and open the file.
June 8th, 2009 at 3:18 am
That i so cool. I have been trying forever to get rid of a folder inmy HOME directroy that was created by accident. Great little fix. I missed the old root terminal from 8.04 but this is better.
June 8th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
This *is* cool. Only after I installed ‘nautilus-gksu’, logged out & logged back in again, it works… without giving me a password challenge.
Just to be sure, I then opened a system file from the root-nautilus window with ‘gedit’, modified it, and tried to save it. It saved my changes — so I do get root privileges. I wonder if this is a 9.04 bug..??