Hi Nigel and Xauth fans, | Well I remember ages ago having this same problem on a distro, and having | resolved it. Looking back through all my notes, and Doh, I see it was on | Debian. The fix I got was to add the following to /root/.bashrc | export XAUTHORITY=/home/<username>/.Xauthority Thank you for the tips! Extending your idea, I found another solution: $ export XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority $ su That's it. I put the first line into my (ordinary user's) ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile . When I say "su -" my environmental variables are discarded, but when I say "su" my environmental variables are inherited by root. This method is better for me than to put "export XAUTHORITY=/home/<my_username>/.Xauthority" into root's .bashrc, because my system administrators sometimes log in to my machine and become root. When they do so, they might send their windows to my screen without their knowing! A slight downside is that my own, nonstandard environment variables are inherited by root, too. (HOME seems to be overriden by the su command, so that you don't have to worry too much.) Cheers, Ryo ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.