Saturday, April 21, 2007

My new tool: ktsuss... A simple graphic su.

I know I had to write something about the wake on lan software I was writing. I think it is done, but couldn't test it yet, so I don't wanna rush me and write about it and show it in case it doesn't work, so please stay tunned and wait a bit longer.

So, today I will show and talk you about a new thing I was doing these days.
I started working on a replacement for gksu. gksu is like a graphical su. I was trying to understand it and make it work well enough, but I don't know what was in the mind of the gksu's developers, because what they did was a really wrong approach, I don't know why they wrote first a library and then the application (maybe for plugins, I'm just paraphrasing) , but anyways, together they are more than 500k, which is extremely too much.
So I wrote my version of gksu, which is called ktsuss (keep the su simple, stupid). My version is only the setuid wrapper (as GTK doesn't permit setuid programs) and program itself which is less than 3k.
As I know you guys love screenshots, this is how the program looks like:



Anyways, I would like to get feedback on this, so please, let me know if it fails or anything is or goes wrong on it.

Get the program from here: http://dcortarello.googlepages.com/ktsuss-1.0.tar.gz

7 comments:

Guile said...

¡Interesantísimo aplicativo! Lo instalé en mi Gentoo y compiló y se instaló perfecto, y por ahora las aplicaciones que lancé funcionan a la perfección también.

¿Es mucho pedir que además de root también se puedan lanzar aplicaciones como otros usuarios?

RootMe said...

Sisi, doy fe que al menos en el Gentoo de Dar funca bien ;)

Gracias por fixear el tema de las dns en el kwort de la facu, me ahorraste unos milisegundos de laburo :P

Besotes!

Romi

Borromini said...

Ola cabrón :P

Muy bien!

Anonymous said...

just discovered ktsuss - which get things done in the Unix way. Way better than gksu + gnome-keyring, which is simply too BIG.

Anonymous said...

Lo acabo de instalar en XFDE + algunas cosas de Salx y Porteusy funciona a la perfeccion

kajukenbo said...

Hello.

I ran across your ktsuss code and it seems to work pretty well.
I was looking to use it as a drop-in replacement for the ugly xdg-su in OpenSUSE (XFCE).
However it does not support the "-c" switch and I do not seem to be pass arguments to it like with xdg-su.

Any advice?

Thanks!

Nomius said...

Hello kajukenbo... Before antthing, let me thank you for interesting in ktsuss. Now, let's get straight to businness... If you are running this version of ktsuss, it is pretty old and buggy. So please, stop using it and upgrade to this version: http://code.google.com/p/ktsuss/downloads/list
Now, -c isn't needed, as that option makes sense in su, as without it, su gives you a super account shell, and with it it runs the given command. But ktsuss with no parameters will fail, as supposed, since you can't change your running desktop shell or fork it as root as you would do with su.
Ktsuss runs commands as root or as a given user, so telling 'ktsuss -c this command' would be redundant as 'ktsuss this command'. Think that ktsuss would be more like the sudo syntax.

Regards.