How I broke and fixed my kdesu... (permissions hell1)

[dcorleone]

This problem's been resolved, but it took some serious research to figure out, so I thought I'd post it here in case anybody else runs into it.

I'm making my UU 1.7 into a KDE install. In the process, I'm uninstalling as much Gnome stuff as I can, trying to replace all the Gnome apps with KDE equivalents, etc. Eventually I got to the point where I was cleaning out unncessary startup stuff in Bootup Manager. I saw KDM and GDM both running. I'd already changed things so I was using a KDM login screen, and since I'd uninstalled the vast majority of Gnome software already, I didn't really take it seriously when the services tool told me "This may cause serious problems". What's the worst that could happen, I thought? So a few leftover Gnome apps dont' work right, big deal. Oh man was I wrong!

A whole LOT of stuff got fubared and I had to try to get GDM back in there somehow. Apparently you DO need both of 'em if you're running the KDE/Gnome version. Problem is, Bootup manager wouldn't run now. Neither would ksysv, so I couldn't edit the runlevel to put GDM back in there either... Finally I had to break down and go command-line. I checked /etc/X11/default-display-manager to make sure I had KDM setup as my default desktop manager. Then I edited GDM and KDM in the /etc/init.d/ folder. When I first tried gettin' em running again, they were both fighting for control of the desktop. The two files in that folder is where you fix that. There's a line in there that you flip from true to false that defines whether or not each should try to load anyway, even if it's not defined as the default display manager. I set both to True:

# To start gdm even if it is not the default display manager, change
# HEED_DEFAULT_DISPLAY_MANAGER to "false."
HEED_DEFAULT_DISPLAY_MANAGER=true

KDM won't care cuz it IS set to be default. Setting GDM to true keeps it from fighting with KDM for the desktop, but futher down, there's this little chunk:

DAEMON=/usr/sbin/gdm

I THINK that's what makes the GDM backend run during the KDM front-end session. GDM gives up control of the desktop to KDM, but runs in the background as a daemon, providing the services that were all screwed up for me without it, the oddest of which was that I couldn't use kdesu to launch anything, but gksu DID work. I have a lot of my shortcuts setup to kdesu, so none of those would work. Weird. I disable Gnome, but it's the gnome su command that WORKS.