<Disclaimer> As I have been misunderstood in a previous thread which led to some off-topic replies (to which I tried to give sensible answers which I will not do again), let me state up front that I am aware of the security issues involved in altering sudo settings, and that everybody reading this thread should be aware of them too. </Disclaimer>

Is there a way to make Natty's sudo behave as in Maverick and Lucid? I can add a !tty_tickets entry to etc/sudoers, but this will also unlock GUI applications, which is more than I want. Is this a bug? In Lucid and Maverick (where I use the default sudoers file), tty tickets are off by default, but if I close the terminal without typing sudo -k and open Synaptic or Gparted (by clicking on the desktop icon or menu item) I have to reenter my password, which is the behaviour I want (Of course I can open them from the terminal, but the point is that the privileges of the terminal and the GUI seem to be separated). Can I reconfigure Natty's sudo to behave as in Maverick? Or is there a good reason for the new behaviour? (And if there is, why is Maverick's sudo not updated?)

I'm curious: exactly what behavior is it that you want?

Actually, by now I am mainly curious myself,and trying to figure out whether the !tty_tickets entry I added to /etc/sudoers is a good idea, or whether to activate the root password for Debian. Sudo seems to have been updated a lot recently, so there seems to be a lot of doubt around about it, and nothing really helpful on the www.

In ubuntu I could (and still can) do sudo -i and exit without having to retype the password again before the next sudo, but if I opened another terminal, or a GUI application that required privileges I had to authenticate again. So there is a difference to the present behaviour of sudo (in Natty and Debian), where exit will kill your timestamp. I can see how that might be safer, but it is very cumbersome. As I have no files on my computer that I can't afford to lose and use ufw default deny, it may be permissible to use less strict settings. So what I want is to get back the old sudo -i and exit behaviour but leave the rest as it is, if that is possible or desirable.

This has to do with updates to bash not to Debian or Ubuntu.

If you exit by typing "exit" you should be fine or if you use Ctrl+d to exit. That last has the advantage of not filling your history with exit commands.

I, personally, have no use for sudo in Debian at all. I prefer to just use "su" and never have to use sudo at all. For that matter I usually just "sudo su" in Ubuntu.

Thanks, widget. I have been thinking of getting rid of sudo myself. Guess there is a reason that Debian doesn't use it by default.