Hello, i'm using Debian Wheezy. I installed Kde and then after that i installed synaptic, and it works perfectly as it should. I decided to install gnome and xfce later. I did minimal install of all three desktop environments for the record. If i try to use synaptic in gnome or xfce, it asks for my root password, i enter it and the box goes away, but then nothing happens, synaptic doesn't open. I have gksu installed as well.
I couldn't find a bug report for this, but i am terrible at locating specific bug reports. I don't think this is a bug, i suspect i'm just missing a package but i don't know what.

Start it with from the command line to see if there are error-messages.

I don't know why i never noticed this before, but when i entered gksu i get the following.
When i start synaptic through gksu, i get this.
Synaptic opens when opened using gksu from the command line, but it won't open when opened from the icon.

[Edit]
The above was done in xfce; i've just done the same check in gnome, Still it will not open from the icon, but it will from gksu, but in gnome, it reports no errors.

An old bug or misbehavior ? Happens now and then.
( Don't remember how many year, may be the last 5 ? )

Any terminal and 1) su 2) synaptic
.. has been my solution.

And later on synaptic is OK again by using the "Desktop entry".

.

synaptic from the menu is started with pkexec as opposed to gksu. If you remove policykit-1, pkexec is removed and the launcher for synaptic in the menu is not updated to use gksu - which is technically a bug.

Here's another one having wheezy synaptic problems.
In fact, I've had loads of problems with wheezy over the last couple of weeks, seemingly because of policycoreutils.
Did a full upgrade using synaptic yesterday (15/07/2012), then disabled the policycoreutils file in /etc/init.d/ and had to install policycoreutils from the cli - everything seemed ok, to my surprise, then found synaptic wouldn't start from kde icon.

Just tried from konsole, with following result:

home/user1# synaptic
Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
(synaptic:5092): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

Any tips will be gratefully received...

Peter

wheezy synaptic : quick update
I usually use Quicksand to start my applications, and synaptic still won't start from that or the cli, as I said.
But following one of the tips above, I just went to the kde menu structure, and found that synaptic starts ok from there.

A bit of a mystery, but it makes it for the time being more of a minor bug than a serious problem.

Over the last year-or-so, the overheads of using testing (wheezy right now), rather than stable (squeeze) seemed to have increased quite a bit. Had loads of trouble when they introduced nouveau : without knoppix I'd never have fixed it. And recently it's been very large update volumes (~ 1GB), and dependency based boot and policycoreutils.

Peter

You're trying to run it from a root terminal so that's a pretty normal result.

Open a terminal emulator and do

Or use the alt+f2 run command box and enter the same there.

If it doesn't work from the terminal (command not found), that's because you need to fix kdesu to work properly:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.p...art=15#p443427

1 members found this post helpful.

caravel --
yes, thanks for the tip: that worked.
But it's a change in behaviour since I upgraded. Before quicksand would accept just "synaptic", and then ask for root pwd automatically.
It's scarcely dramatic, but you have to find it out.
But it's led me on to something else useful: I can now open dolphin as root using your technique: before I had to use kdesudo in konsole. I'm not terribly happy from a security point-of-view with sudo, and would like to disable it. Will now do so.

Thanks again

Peter