From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020809 Description of problem: You can run nautilus has root, but it works only well if you use the --no-desktop option. My proposal is to add a command nautilus-root, that would start up with the --no-desktop option, and authentifying using pam. I could do that myself using a script and creating a corresponding file in pam.d, but of course shell scripts are too unsecure to do this. So a complete setup with binary and a menu entry, plus a clear look for the nautilus window, that identifies it as root, would be useful addition to RedHat. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: N/A Additional info:
Personally I would not do this (I'd expect nautilus to do things like drop metadata under /usr...) But of course it should be made to work, as you should be able to do root tasks without using the command line.
Yes, you are right of course. There could be a special root nautilus mode, that might implement some access properties like in sudo.
It would be nice in general to have better ways to handle operations that need root in the GUI. I'm not sure running a whole nautilus as root is a good idea. Anyway, this has to be solved upstream. Upstream already know about this issue, so I'm just gonna close this bug for now. Thanks for your comments.