Re: Running GParted and Synaptic without entering password

[John Crawley (johnraff)]

On 2018-05-14 16:56, Joe wrote:
On Sun, 13 May 2018 14:43:55 -0500
If your micro-installation contains them, gksu and gksudo are graphical
equivalents of su and sudo. I start Synaptic from a menu entry, which
uses gksudo.

gksu is now deprecated as insecure,
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892768
and will not be available in Debian Buster as far as I can see.
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gksu&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all

Even on Stretch and (I think) Wheezy, Gparted and Synaptic both shipped  
.desktop files which caused them to be launched by the policykit  
alternative, pkexec instead of gksu.

Policykit brings its own complications, but I think it should be  
possible to create a .pkla file in /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority to  
allow a certain user, or group member, to perform an action defined in  
/usr/share/polkit-1/actions/* without a password. You could even add a  
new action if necessary.

See also: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=137326

--
John