I'm having a very strange problem... I can't su while in KDE. I don't have any other window managers loaded, so I don't know for sure if KDE is to blame, but it seems to be the likely suspect. I can logon with root locally, through WEBMIN and SSH but when I'm logged in and running X, with KDE I cannot su any of the KDE admin packages, or in a terminal window. Does this even sound feasable? I'm getting kinda frustrated with Mandrake in general, and this is just one more reason for me to switch...





...to Debian.

Thanks for any assistance or Ideas everyone.

Is the user you are logged in as a member of the group "wheel"? This group allows users to su to root.

type "groups" at shell to find out. If wheel is not listed as a group, log in as root and enter "gpasswd -a <username> wheel"

hope this helps,
jrtayloriv

jrtayloriv,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm a wheel member now, but it does not seem to help. It still tells me 'incorrect password' I'm being VERY careful when I type the password, so that I am certain not to fat-finger it. I guess I should have been a little more precise in my description, I'm sorry for any vagueness.

This mornign when I tried your solution, I SSH'd to my box from work, loging in as myself, checking my group membership. I logged out, started SSH again and this time logged in as root. The password worked then. I made the changes you suggested, and logged out and then back in as myself. As myself I checked my group membership and then tried to su. It asked for the password, I gave it the same one I used to login as root earlier, and it comes back with an incorrect password statement.

At this point I should add, this was working fine, up until a couple of weeks ago when the system locked up tight. Not being incredibly patient at the time I started another terminal (alt-F2) logged in as root, and told the PC to reboot. If memory serves, I believe that my other login was doing some sort of su oriented task (I have no idea whether or not this has any bearing on the problem or not). Since then su has not worked. I've gone into WEBMIN a couple of times to change the root password, to make sure that I have not forgotten it, but it always says incorrect password when I try to do anything su oriented.

Is there a password file in my profile somewhere that I can delete, or fix or something? With that thought I'm going to create a new user and see if it can su.

Thanks for the feedback,

Have you looked at the SSH server module in Webmin, I had the exact same problem and I found that I hadn't set the permission for root login from one of my computers!! Hope this helps :-)

KDE uses "kdesu" program to start things like Install Packages which needs root access