It’s a handy feature of Gnome that pressing “PrntScrn” or “Alt+PrntScrn” will take a screen capture of the desktop or current window, respectively. However, in typical Gnome fashion, you can’t do anything more advanced. You can’t capture a region, or a window area. You can’t delay the capture. You can’t save the captures with iterating, numbered filenames. However, the equivalent KDE tool can do all of those things, and you can make Gnome use it.

When you press the PrntScrn key, Gnome calls gnome-screenshot. When you press Alt+PrntScrn, it calls gnome-screenshot --window. Again, typical Gnome design means you cannot configure what command is called. But you can make your own gnome-screenshot script which calls ksnapshot.

Create a script in /usr/local/bin or $HOME/bin (if you have that in your path), and edit it.

sudo touch /usr/local/bin/gnome-screenshot
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/gnome-screenshot
sudo vi /usr/local/bin/gnome-screenshot

Now paste in the following:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "--window" ] ; then
   ksnapshot -c
else
   ksnapshot
fi

Save and quit, and you’re done! Pressing PrntScrn now opens ksnapshot.

My opinion is that Lucid improves on Karmic in almost every way. That’s not saying much, since the KDE 4 upgrade has been so painful. We’re finally back to KDE 3.5 functionality, and speed is improving with each release. On the other hand, there are a lot of new features in the OS since Hardy – grub2, ext4, ecryptfs, upstart, kernel mode setting, compositing window management, Strigi indexing and Nepomuk semantic desktop. Some of these have dramatically improved performance, while others have increased system requirements just to add eye candy. It’s hard to evaluate KDE on its own, so I’m not going to focus on that.

I backed up my entire drive to an external USB drive formatted for ext3 using rsync. I then booted from the Kubuntu 10.04 AMD64 Desktop CD, and followed the default install options until the disk partitioning step. I always install with separate /, /home, and swap partitions (this normally makes upgrades easier, unless you are reformatting as I did here). I used ext4 for / and /home, and chose to encrypt my home directory. I then followed the rest of the steps and rebooted at the end.

Following the reboot, I used rsync to restore my lost files and most of my dotfiles – .mozilla, .gnome, .gconf, .Virtualbox, and the like. However, I did not restore .kde. Instead I manually copied only some configs, for KGPG, Akregator, and Kopete. The rest of my KDE apps I reconfigured from scratch. I did this because we use Kolab at work, which integrates with Kontact but can be fussy with local contacts files. As of Lucid, Kontact uses Akonadi to manage contacts. I expected trouble, and found it. More on that later.

Finally, since I have an encrypted home directory, I also encrypted swap and created a tmpfs on /tmp. I followed the steps in my guide, and rebooted with no problems.

What’s better:

The ext4 filesystem is noticeably faster. This is the reason I reformatted instead of upgrading. I used ext3 under Karmic, and really wanted to see if what I’d been hearing about the speedy new filesystem is true. It is. It’s faster for booting and it’s faster for reading large data. My Virtualbox virtual machines load in almost half the time, even compared to the same Virtualbox 3.2.6 release on Karmic. I suppose there could be other differences contributing to this but it really stands out. I haven’t run an fsck yet but others report that it is much faster as well.

ext4 has definitely improved performance of copying data inside my encrypted home directory. I barely notice the performance hit from using ecryptfs now. The only time I do is when using rsync to compare large directories (like when my backup process examines my mail archive).

There is a new touchpad control in KDE Control Center. This enables gestures, including two-finger scrolling (but not pinch-to-zoom, which I hope is forthcoming), and different actions for tapping in corners, multi-finger tapping, and so on. Still missing is tap suppression (accidentally tapping while typing), so I still use syndaemon. Create ~/.kde/Autostart/syndaemon.sh, make it executable, and insert:

#!/bin/sh
# Disable touchpad while typing to prevent accidental tapping.
/usr/bin/syndaemon -d -t -i 1

The device notifier plasmoid now has multiple actions when opening attached storage devices, and can be configured to automatically mount drives. This is a vast improvement.

The system tray plasmoid now obeys my auto-hide preferences. Under Jaunty and Karmic, some applications had overriding preferences that caused them to always be hidden or visible. For instance, it was impossible to make KGPG always visible. I frequently use KGPG, so this caused me to almost always have the system tray expanded to show all applications.

Firefox/KDE integration works very well. Open/save file dialogs use KDE, and menus and icons use KDE defaults. The printer dialog is still the native Firefox one.

virt-manager is vastly improved. The GUI is more responsive when connecting, is prettier, and has graphs for CPU, disk, and network I/O.

ClusterSSH works with KWin again. Since 8.10, ClustterSSH has been nearly broken in KDE. First, simply starting it caused copy (to clipboard or selection) to stop working in most QT/KDE apps. Second, the ClusterSSH master window would grab focus and prevent you from giving focus to any of its children xterms. This made it very hard to run commands on just one host without running it on all. I gave up and used various other techniques for managing my servers. But nothing beats ClusterSSH for managing 2-20 servers at once, and I’ve sorely missed it. Welcome back, old friend!

What needed tweaking:

The Oxygen window decoration theme still doesn’t colourise the active window. Open System Settings, go to “Appearance”, then the “Windows” side bar. Under the “Window Decoration” tab, choose “Oxygen”. Under the “Decoration Options” area, choose the “Fine Tuning” sub-tab. Check “Outline active window title”.

Hotkeys in Kmenu are ignored. I use a few quick-launch shortcuts, such as “Win+T” to start a terminal. You can set these when editing the K menu, but they are ignored by default. Open System Settings, select “Input Actions”, and then check “KMenuEdit”.

VirtualBox and virt-manager don’t play well together. I don’t use Xen or KVM on my desktop, but I do manage several KVM-based virtual machine servers. Thanks to the new “install recommends” preference in the package manager, simply installing virt-manager also installs libvirt-bin. This loads the kvm-intel or kvm-amd modules on boot, which then prevents VirtualBox from starting virtual machines, with the error “VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).”

I suppose this is really a problem with the “install recommends” behaviour. I’ve complained about that elsewhere, but I always repeat a good gripe when the opportunity presents.

The solution is to edit /etc/default/libvirt-bin and disable libvirtd:

start_libvirtd="no"

And for good measure, blacklist the modules. Create /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf and insert:

blacklist kvm-intel
blacklist kvm-amd

What still needs work:

Akonadi doesn’t start before Kontact tries to access it. This solution (autostarting “akonadictl start” at login) worked for me, although I (painfully) developed it independently. If only I had used Google.

openvpn with knetworkmanager still doesn’t work. I still prefer Gnome’s network manager applet, which works just fine with Kubuntu. Kill knetworkmanager, and start nm-applet. Next time you login, KDE will tell you that another network manager is running, and ask you if you still want to use Knetworkmanager. Say no. Also, OpenVPN support is more reliable under Lucid. Using Gnome network manager with Kubuntu Karmic, the OpenVPN service would periodically fail to start. Editing VPN preferences and then hitting OK sometimes resolved it, but at other times it was an annoying and random dance to make it work. This seems to be resolved under Lucid.

OpenOffice/KDE integration is improved since Karmic, but still has drawing bugs. In particular, the zoom slider in the lower right often disappears. It’s still there, and clicking in the area makes it reappear and zooms. I prefer the “100% / 75% / …” pull-down of the stock OpenOffice theme, however. This is a vast improvement over the Karmic integration, where simply dragging a spreadsheet tab in Calc crashed OpenOffice, but I’d like to see more development here.

Otherwise, my comments regarding Karmic still hold. Google Earth and Kwin play nicely, qtcurve (KDE/GTK integration) is awesome and no longer has the font bug, and Plasma and Kwin are faster and more stable. Lucid is no great leap forward and Kubuntu is still not an innovator among KDE distributions like Ubuntu is to Gnome. But it is an incremental improvement worth using if you prefer KDE.

I have had a Lucid repository since upgrading my media PC and servers. It now includes dfreer’s znes32 for AMD64 (still working on Lucid) and kregexpeditor (you can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead hands).

I recommend you install Open With, a generic extension capable of opening the current page or selected link with any application. KDE users can simply open the extension preferences, select the “Manual Entries” tab, select “Add”, and enter “/usr/bin/konqueror”.

The hardy version of kregexpeditor still works on karmic, and I’ve used pbuilder to port the jaunty package of grip to karmic. Both are now in the repo.

Jaunty has been my Windows Vista. I wish I had never upgraded, and waited instead for Karmic. For anyone using Intel video (I use a Dell Vostro 1500 with an onboard Intel GM965/GL960), Jaunty and KDE4 was a terrible experience. Compared to Hardy and KDE3, video performance was dramatically worse. When playing videos frames would drop, 3D acceleration was slower, everything showed more tearing effects, and most KDE4 apps showed graphics corruption in various rarely-updated areas such as the icon toolbar in Kontact.

I had already discovered the video issues when I wrote my last upgrade post, but hadn’t yet realised the extend of the wireless issues. I have two cards in my laptop:

tyler@baal:~$ lspci | grep -i network
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
0d:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

Under Jaunty, the Intel card caused kernel panics on shutdown. So I blacklisted the driver and used the Atheros card, only to discover problems with both the ath_pci and ath5k drivers. The former doesn’t work with network manager, and with the latter the card would sometimes fail in a state requiring full hardware reset, meaning powering the laptop off and on again. This would happen on bootup too, causing me to sometimes reboot several times to make wireless work. It is not good to begin the workday filled with frustration and rage.

I did my best to mitigate the issues under Jaunty, including using the latest KDE backports from the Kubuntu PPA. But the only real solution to my video problems was to upgrade to the latest kernel, X, and intel video drivers. I use Ubuntu because I want reasonably recent packages but without the headache of running true alpha / bleeding-edge releases. Replacing all the critical parts of the distro seemed like the wrong way to go. So I suffered and waited for the day Karmic came out.

The 9.10 release notes cover a number of known issues. What strikes me about the known issues is how few of them affect me. Many are related to the netbook remix, or specific to recent netbooks with proprietary hardware. Support for the general case of mostly Intel hardware released 1-2 years ago is all there.

Upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic was just a matter of doing what the GUI prompted me to do. This wasn’t like jumping from KDE 3 to 4, so I didn’t remove any dotfiles or reformat. I just made my usual backup and then did the upgrade. I had a problem and had to stop the upgrade during the post-download, configuration part, so I ran dpkg --configure -a in a terminal and everything finished just fine.

What went wrong:

Synaptics touchpad tap suppression (syndaemon) stopped working. This is an artifact of upgrading from Jaunty, where to use syndaemon you have to enable SHMConfig in xorg.conf and then run syndaemon as syndaemon -S -d -t -i 1. On upgrading to karmic, set SHMConfig to false, restart X, and call syndaemon without -S (the switch doesn’t exist anymore anyway). I just removed my xorg.conf altogether, since X doesn’t seem to need it.

ath_pci, the madwifi Atheros wireless driver, is gone. I use this for aircrack and kismet. It is likely that I can either compile it or use the ath or ath5k drivers for the same thing, but I haven’t had time to test this.

openvpn with knetworkmanager still doesn’t work, at least with certificates that don’t have a passphrase. So far, openvpn doesn’t even start. From syslog:

Nov  1 13:51:32 baal NetworkManager:   nm_vpn_connection_connect_cb(): VPN connection 'company vpn' failed to connect: 'No VPN secrets!'.

Even if it did work, the dialog doesn’t even have a tab for manually setting up routes. Since when is the equivalent Gnome app more configurable than its KDE counterpart?

Ozone, the default KDE window theme, doesn’t use colour to denote the active window. Instead it uses stripes to the right of the text in the title bar. Some people say that compositing window managers and transparency are supposed to make this a non-issue, but they are wrong. I expect my active window to have a blue window border, and the others to be grey. To fix this, open the Control Centre. Go to “Appearance”, then the “Windows” side bar. Under the “Window Decoration” tab, choose “Ozone”. Under the “Decoration Options” area, uncheck “Blend title bar colours with window contents”.

What went right:

kernel mode setting is awesome! This currently works only for those of us that use Intel video, which is perhaps a small reward for suffering through Jaunty. Switching between X and virtual terminals is fast and seamless. The console has a gorgeous high-res mode at boot-time. I haven’t seen the screen flicker once since GRUB booted the kernel, from X startup to the KDM greeter to Plasma startup.

Booting is very fast. On my laptop I see KDM within 15 seconds of the kernel loading. I have a usable desktop 15 seconds after that. I’m sure more things are starting in the background, but they don’t seem to slow down my login process.

Xorg just figures everything out. I no longer have an xorg.conf and all my hardware works. Plus xrandr now has a large virtual area by default:

tyler@baal:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192

This should work just fine with multi-monitor setups.

Google Earth and Kwin with compositing work at the same time. So far I’ve had no issue with any 3D apps running together, and they are all about 3 times as fast as they were under Jaunty.

qtcurve, the new KDE/GTK appearance integration engine. This replaced the deprecated gtk-qt engine which had all kinds of drawing errors especially with firefox. Qtcurve uses your “general” font setting from KDE in GTK apps, and generally makes GTK apps look like KDE ones. Unfortunately it is broken out of the box. The solution is to install the “kcm-gtk” package, and then use Control Centre to edit your “general” font setting. Set it to something else and then back again, or put this in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals:

[General]
XftHintStyle=hintmedium
font=DejaVu Sans,8,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

Wireshark never looked so pretty.

Firefox 3.5, which really is as fast as you’ve heard. KDE users, give up and use the default theme. All the “hack it to look like KDE” themes just don’t work as well as the one the developers themselves test against.

Plasma is stable. This isn’t a surprise as I’ve been running 4.3.2 from the PPA under Jaunty. Since Karmic is stable I’m not going to use the PPA for bleeding edge KDE releases anymore (until another juicy feature gets released, no doubt).

fish, the Kioslave for file transfer over SSH, is fast once again. It no longer generates notifications for normal browsing activity, either, which was extremely irritating under Jaunty.

knetworkmanager works once again. It was more than a little annoying to use Gnome’s network manager.

They finally got it right with Amarok 2.2. iPod support seems complete, the GUI is configurable (why does the playlist default to the right pane?), the collection scanner is much faster than Amarok 1.4, and it hasn’t crashed yet.

Karmic has been added to the repository.

kdelibs5-dev: Conflicts: kdelibs4-dev but 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-1ubuntu8 is to be installed

I’m sure I could have resolved this, but I decided to test the hardy package before spending any more effort. The package installed without complaint, and the binary runs. I’ve added the amd64 and i386 packages from hardy-backports to the repo for jaunty.

I’m sad to see kregexpeditor go, as it is the only decent means of visualising complex regular expressions. It is apparently orphaned upstream, with no plans to port it to KDE 4.

I waited 4 months after the release of jaunty, so the problems should be either documented or resolved, and the release notes didn’t mention anything that seemed too serious. So I decided to give it a test.

First I made a complete backup with rsync to an external USB2 harddrive (partitioned ext3). I partition my harddrive with separate root (/) and home (/home) partitions, so in the event of a reinstall I don’t have to restore my data from backup. So the second thing I did was to copy /, excluding /home, to /home/root.old/. I’ll keep this backup for a few months so I can compare config files and copy over whatever I’ve forgotten, like udev rules, apache configs, etc. You’d be surprised what stuff you changed in /etc a year ago and then forgot about. Finally, I cloned just the dotfiles in /home/tyler to /home/tyler.old. I expected KDE 4 to mangle all my settings, so just to be safe I kept a backup.

Then I upgraded, following the instructions. When the upgrade was done and I rebooted, everything was totally screwed up. The icon for the KDE menu had become a left-arrow, various hotkeys were remapped, customised application toolbars were screwed up, and the KDE menu hierarchy was a mess. To be fair, I tend to be hard on the menus and toolbars.

OK, log out, remove all the dotfiles in /home/tyler, and log in again. This should give me a default KDE 4 desktop and application environment. I can copy individual dotfiles back later. Nope, icons still borked. I expected this to happen (skipping a release, moving to KDE 4), so I reinstalled 9.04 directly as a fresh install. As usual, I selected manual partitioning, reused and reformatted the root partition, and reused /home without formatting. I also left /home/tyler with no dotfiles, again to make the transition easier.

After the install, things were much better. KDE 4′s desktop (Plasma) was happy, icons were normal, and I didn’t have 16 months of installed cruft all over the /usr/local tree (sometimes I compile from source, typically network hacking tools). I copied back dotfiles for firefox; wireshark; and the kde apps kontact, kmail, kabc, korganizer, kopete, and amarok; and a few others. I avoided copying anything with “event” and “ui” in it, as I wanted to try the new default UI settings.

Since then I’ve enabled the PPA for KDE updates and am now using KDE 4.3 (stock jaunty only offers 4.2.2).

What went wrong:

Intel video is totally borked. Seriously, if you are using Intel video, stay on intrepid or wait for karmic. The warning in the release notes is not worded strongly enough. DO NOT USE JAUNTY AND INTEL VIDEO. I’m using a GM965 chipset, which is partially functional. Google Earth and Kwin compositing don’t get along at all, and all OpenGL and video operations perform significantly worse under jaunty. There are random graphics corruption issues in KDE apps, but mousing over most of them causes them to redraw. Two months to go, and I’m seriously considering the karmic beta. Some help is available, but I’m not willing to add to my problems by running an unsupported kernel.

Kontact/Korganizer pops up an annoying dialog whenever you select a contact with more than one email address. This is a known issue in 4.2.2, and it prompted me to move to 4.3.

Kopete has inexplicably renamed all instances of “MSN Messenger”, including the variables in its rc files, to “WLM Messenger”. So after upgrading from Kopete for KDE 3, enable the “WLM Messenger” plugin, and then change a bunch of things:

1. ~/.kde/share/config/kopeterc, replace all instances of “MSNProtocol” with “WlmProtocol”.
2. ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/contactlist.xml, replace all instances of “MSNProtocol” with “WlmProtocol”.
3. ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/, rename directory “msnpictures” to “wlmpictures”
4. (If using the History plugin) ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete/logs/, rename directory “MSNProtocol” to “WlmProtocol”
5. (If using the OTR plugin) ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete_otr/privkeys, replace all instances of “MSN Messenger” with “WLM Messenger”
6. (If using the OTR plugin) ~/.kde/share/apps/kopete_otr/fingerprints, replace all instances of “MSN Messenger” with “WLM Messenger”

I really appreciate all the hard work done by the KDE developers. But I have a very special kick in the nuts for whoever did this. Please, either enable backwards compatibility, or write an upgrade script! If you must change the cosmetic name of an option, do so in the user interface. But don’t arbitrarily change variable and directory names! Some of us have existing configurations that we’d like to have continue working, thank you.

Amarok 2 still has poor iPod support, and crashes frequently. I have joined the hordes that downgraded to Amarok 1.4. I am now much happier. Configuring the iPod in Amarok 1.4 is easy:

1. sudo apt-get install pmount
2. append your iPod devices to /etc/pmount.allow (first and second USB devices for me, just in case I plugin a drive or stick at the same time):

   /dev/sdb1
   /dev/sdb2
   /dev/sdc1
   /dev/sdc2

3. sudo dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 4755 /usr/bin/eject
4. In Amarok, set iPod pre-connect command to “pmount /dev/disk/by-label/IPODLABEL ipod” where “IPODLABEL” is the filesystem label of your device. You could use /dev/sdb2 here, but that changes if you plug in anything else.
5. In Amarok, set iPod post-disconnect command to “pumount %m; eject /dev/disk/by-label/IPODLABEL”

Step 3 means any normal user can eject devices, which isn’t an issue on desktops. Anybody know what happened to the “kdeeject” command?

apt-get/KPackageKit/Synaptic now install packages in the “Recommended” line by default. This is a really dumb idea, at least until all the mainstream packages are updated. Why do I get exim installed if I just want smartmontools? I would like to be able to check my harddrive temperature without installing a mail server, thank you. Create /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99no-install-recommends with the contents:

APT::Install-Recommends "false";

Unfortunately, it seems some of the metapackages such as ubuntu-restricted-extras have switched from using “Depends” (the correct behaviour) to “Recommends”. Thanks, guys! Now we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

kregexpeditor is gone, and no replacement exists. I mourn.

knetworkmanager has been replaced by the abundantly inferior “Network Management” plasmoid. Although you can reinstall it, it doesn’t work with openvpn and its functionality has been reduced (it doesn’t display new connections automatically, for instance. I’ve installed network-manager-gnome and network-manager-openvpn in the interim. However, openvpn won’t work until you edit /etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-openvpn-service.conf and add the following to the “busconfig” stanza:

<policy user="at_console">
        <allow own="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.openvpn"/>
        <allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.openvpn"/>
</policy>

Intel 3945 wireless is unstable. I guess it always was, but knetworkmanager had a habit of restarting the card. Now it’s just screwed. I’ve got a second wireless card, an Atheros AR242x chipset, which I’ve long used for injecting wireless packets to crack WEP networks. That works just fine. I imagine I’ll revisit this issue once I have to upgrade my wife’s laptop, which only has an Intel 3945. Or I’ll buy a £10 Atheros and replace it.

Plasma crashes sometimes. But it restarts immediately, without losing anything. It did this the first time I logged in after a fresh install, which is not a strong selling point for using KDE 4 or Jaunty. If you have issues with this, delete ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc and ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc, or edit them and fix geometry lines that cannot fit on your screen or that use floating-point numbers.

What went right:

Suspend and resume work flawlessly. Perhaps this is because I no longer use the Intel wireless card, but I’ve had no problems at all and I’ve resumed at least 30 times since upgrading. This is the first time it has ever been stable on any laptop I use (mostly Dells using Intel or ATI video, and Intel wireless).

KDE 4 is shiny, shiny, shiny. Also a little slower, but that could be the Intel video issue. I love Kwin compositing, especially the exposé-like zooming out by application or by desktop. I hardly use the desktop pager now. The plasmoids (desktop widgets) are great. I see it is going to be hot tomorrow, and that it will rain on Thursday.

New KDE apps are no longer infested with an abundance of the letter K. Rock on, Plasma! Rock on, Dolphin. At last, sanity!

khexedit has been replaced by Okteta. It is better. Install it.

Webcam support on amd64 works better. My webcam used to freeze after 5-10 seconds. Now it works with Cheese and Skype.

The KDE games packages have shiny new Egyptian themes. They look very good, and many have polished new features.

Overall, I’m happy with KDE 4, but I’m not sure the Intel video issues are worth it. I’ll wait for Karmic, and then we’ll really have to evaluate if we are to move to that release internally. Unlike the rest of hardy, the Kubuntu packages go unmaintained this October, so we have little choice if we want to stay with KDE. Which is something we’re considering.

I am fed up with the increasing obsolescence of Konqueror. It simply fails to deal with much of the Ajax bling and javascript doodads that are all over the web now. Facebook is nearly unusable, Slashdot has unusual formatting errors, and banking sites fail in odd ways. Compatibility changes daily as web developers tweak their javascript and CSS. Last month I switched back to Firefox.

Still there are times when I’m viewing a site in Firefox and want to switch to Konqueror. Konqueror has an easy “Open With” submenu, but no such thing exists for Firefox. Instead, everybody has written their own Firefox extension to support their personal choice of browser. Often with platform-specific requirements. And now I have too!

Behold, Open With Konqueror!

You’ll have to approve installations from my site to proceed. If you are the type of person that uses KDE, chances are you already know how to do that. I have also submitted it to addons.mozilla.org.

Credits: I copied this extension from IE View Lite by Grayson Mixon. I modified it in the following ways:

• Replace all references to IE with Konqueror in dialogs, variable, and extension names
• Include Konqueror icons from the Crystal SVG set in resolutions of 16×16 and 32×32
• Change the path of the browser to use to “/usr/bin/konqueror”, the default in Kubuntu

1. Allow root to display applications on the user’s desktop

Normally only the logged-in user has the authority to run X applications. This is a good thing, and a useful security feature. Running commands as your user with sudo allows that application to use your X session, like so:

sudo wireshark

However, this doesn’t work:

sudo -i
(now as root) wireshark

We can work around this by modifying root’s ~/.Xauthority file. Either copy yours or link it into /root/, and you’re done:

cd /root/
ln -f -s /home/username/.Xauthority

If you have multiple users on the same machine, you can achieve the same goal by merging several files using the xauth command.

2. Retain environment variables when you execute sudo

OK, now root can make X apps display on tyler’s display, but he still has to set the DISPLAY variable or pass a -display argument. So let’s keep this variable when we login as root with “sudo -i“.

Add the following somewhere in /etc/sudoers:

Defaults                 env_keep+="DISPLAY XAUTHORITY"

Or just for one user:

Defaults:username        env_keep+="DISPLAY XAUTHORITY"

Now DISPLAY, and if you use it, XAUTHORITY, follow you if you use sudo. You can add any others to this list if you like.

3. Keep the same GTK preferences as root

Now, your root GTK apps run and display, but they look like something from Windows 95. This is because GTK has absolutely horrific default settings which are nearly always overridden by your window manager’s theme, and root doesn’t have your GTK preferences. That’s easy to fix:

cd /root/
ln -f -s /home/username/.gtkrc-2.0

And if you use KDE with the “Use my KDE style in GTK applications” (gtk-qt-engine) setting, you might also want:

cd /root/
ln -f -s /home/username/.gtk_qt_engine_rc

Finally, I just like a better sudo prompt. So I set this at the botton of /etc/bash.bashrc on every machine I manage:

export SUDO_PROMPT="[sudo] password for %u@%h: "

This is better than the sudo default (the totally ambiguous “Password: “) or the Ubuntu default (“[sudo] password for username: “) because it also lists the host you are currently on. If you login to as many machines as I do, confusing one sudo prompt for another is an easy way to ruin your day.