[sf-lug] GKsu has long been EOLed

[Rick Moen]

Quoting David Rosenstrauch (darose at darose.net):

> I agree with the larger point that there's precious few instances
> where you would ever want to run GUI tools as root.  But there are a
>  few. Gparted in particular stands out in my mind as one of the few
> times I've seen a compelling case for using gksu.

As you suggest in your postscript, GParted (GNOME Partition Editor) is
a gtk graphical front-end to the core library (libparted) of console
tool GNU Parted, and is indeed a nice alternative to using GNU Parted
itself for creating, resizing, moving, and copying partitions.

However, personally, if I set out to do those things, I would always
reach for a 'rescue'/maintenance live distro like SystemRescueCD
(http://www.system-rescue-cd.org).  A rescue distribution is specialised
for that work (among the advantages being that the system you want to do
work on will be quiescent), and simply boots directly into a basic
graphical X11 environment as the root user.  Therefore, no escalation to
root privilege is required (e.g., gksu or other).

A maintenance live distro is one of the edge-case exceptions to the
general rule that you want to avoid running graphical applications as
root (and, generally speaking) particularly avoid logging into X11 as
root:  These are very pared-down graphical systems (not exactly GNOME),
all of the graphical maintenance tools are one _designed_ to run with
system privilege, and  you're not going to be running with networking
enabled (so it's not like you'll be attacked).

The latest SystemRescueCD release, 6.0.1, is x86_64 only, so I keep
around the prior version, 5.3.2, in case it's needed for i386 systems.
It's IMO something every Linux user ought to keep around.

There are alternative rescue/maintenance distros:  GParted Live,
Clonezilla Live, MorpheusArch Linux, Super Grub2 Disk (specialised for
solely repairing GRUB), Plop Linux, Rescatux.   I haven't tried most of
those.