Fedora :: ConsoleHelper - Making Apps Ask For Passwords

Many people would like not to have to open a terminal or have more granular control over permitions that can be achieved using PAM permissions(read the man pages for PAM for more information) and the consolehelper.

The sources for this comes from Red Hat manuals

Say we want to have gedit ask for a root pasword so we do the fallowing.

- Step 1 - Open a terminal. (Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal)
- Step 2 - Become root:

Code:
su -
- Step 3 - Create a symlink in /usr/sbin/
Code:
cd /usr/bin
ln -s consolehelper gedit-root
- Step 4 - Create a PAM configuration file in /etc/pam.d/foo:

[Code].....

Name it gedit-root.desktop and save it to /usr/share/applications/ and you are done. Now when you need to edit your config files you can just click on the gedit-root and it will open gedit as root.

ps: I took this configurations from the original gedit.desktop file and edited a little.

You can now make programs ask for permissions like nautilus when you want to navigate through root owned folders, you can make the nvidia settings start as root and you can now using the PAM file describe what can be done or not.