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MoonSwan

Member

From: Great White North

Registered: 2008-01-23

Posts: 881

[solved] Cannot start GUI applications as a different user in KDE

I don't know whether this is relevant or not but here are some KDM errors that seem to occur if I try to login with my normal user account then try to run a GUI application as another user in a konsole or uxterm window:

AUDIT: Sun Mar 30 17:51:35 2008: 31728 X: client 6 rejected from local host (uid 506)
AUDIT: Sun Mar 30 17:51:35 2008: 31728 X: client 6 rejected from local host (uid 506)
AUDIT: Sun Mar 30 17:51:35 2008: 31728 X: client 6 rejected from local host (uid 506)

This behaviour is consistent even in another WM (fluxbox) and frankly its driving me nuts because I've never had this kind of issue before.  I have asked in irc & looked at the wiki for help but have so far failed to find any help for this issue.  The suggestions from irc I got were that I try to run the Display command or xhost & see if they are borked.  These are not part of the issue so far as I can tell as the people who asked for this information said my settings are correct.  They were, afterward, rather mystified as much as I am.

{edit} Resolved after finding hints about using xhost in another thread.  The solution is simple enough but unintuitive if you're not aware a normal user can use the "xhost" program and the man page for this app isn't very good imo.

The solution itself is to run this one line command as a user or root:

xhost local:swan

where "swan" is the name/hostname of your system.  This can be "myhost" (the default) or another name as specified in your rc.conf file.

Last edited by MoonSwan (2008-03-31 09:05:55)