Kevin Chadwick posted on Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:06:03 +0000 as excerpted:
> How can I switch from polkit-kde-authentication back to kdesudo auth in
> KDE 4.9.
I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I'm interested in an
answer too, for others if not for me, as it turns out I'm reasonably
comfortable with my own policy as described below.
What I've done here (on gentoo where it's actually reasonable to have kde
without polkit, etc), is setup normal terminal-based sudo, with a policy
not to use the X gui for anything superuser based at all.
Instead, I use mc (midnight commander, ncurses/slang based) with it's
commander-style "semi-gui" in a terminal, or the traditional CLI, for any
"sysadmin hat" tasks, including text/config file editing, file
management, etc. For typically "user hat" tasks like multimedia (image,
movie, audio) usage and management, I use the GUI, typically gwenview for
images and movies, dolphin for audio and textfiles as gwenview doesn't
handle that, but for everything else, including editing kde's user config
itself when I end up actually handling the textfiles, I find the
combination of mc and standard CLI commands works just as efficiently for
me, if not more so.
A few months ago, the last time a topic like this came up on the kde
lists, I actually tried kdesu and kdesudo and discovered they no longer
even worked.
Somewhere along the line I had decided my normal user didn't need to be
in wheel (the group with su access) and I didn't feel the need to revert
that decision, so that didn't work, and while sudo still worked, my sudo
policy here only lets my normal user do a few limited things, including
sudoing to an "admin" user, which is far less restricted. But of course
said "admin" user doesn't then have access to the existing normal user X
session, so couldn't run any X-based commands anyway. And again, yes, I
could fix that, but I realized that I really had no need to do so --
everything I needed to do as admin, I was quite comfortable doing in mc
or at the CLI, and the tiny bit of trouble I might occasionally save by
running some GUI admin program wasn't worth the hassle of setting up and
ensuring the proper security of the access necessary to do so.
So instead, I ended up deciding I didn't need a GUI su method at all, and
uninstalled kdesudo. (kdesu is still pulled in as a dependency, but I'm
thinking about testing a bypass of that as well using gentoo's
package.provided, I just haven't, yet.)
As for polkit, consolekit, etc, I turned their USE flags off, and no
longer have them on the system either. I don't run systemd, which
replaces some of consolekit's functionality, either. (FWIW, as many
gentooers, I run openrc as my init system.) Group-based device perms are
sufficient for me, and consolekit only adds another layer that I have had
to troubleshoot problems with in the past, so I'm best off without it. I
do run udev (and have its USE flag turned on, but not udisks or upower
(USE flags turned off), preferring to control mounting myself. My
suspend/hibernate solution is something I scripted myself, and on the
netbook, I have laptop-mode-tools configured for power management , so
don't have/need kde's power management tools (powerdevil and etc)
installed, either.
Actually, given that I have USE=semantic-desktop turned off as well (so
no akonadi thus no kdepim, substituting gtk-based replacements like claws-
mail), while I do run a kde desktop, all the above means it's actually
relatively slim. Package numbers don't mean a lot across distros but for
gentooers this will mean something: 110 packages in a kde upgrade for me
including nearly all kdegames. I guess a full kde install with all the
trimmings is several hundred more. (IIRC mine was 250+ before I started
trimming the fat, tho even that wasn't all of kde.)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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