No More Dolphin Root Workaround?

[TWPonKubuntu]

@jglen490, I drilled down to the source and found this:

https://pointieststick.com/2020/01/0...dmap-for-2020/

Privilege escalation in KIO and Dolphin

I’ve been promising this for years, talking about how it’s 90% done, then 99%, then 99.9%… you get the idea. I know, I know, I’m the boy who cried wolf at this point! Well, this time we really are on the cusp of victory. There is only a single patch left before we can formally turn it on! Once this happens, you will finally be able to create, move, rename etc. root-owned files in Dolphin without needing to run Dolphin as root or using a hacky extension.

I'm doing the happy dance!

[Don B. Cilly]

Interesting site, that Nate's blog.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Agreed, I bookmarked it...

[kubicle]

Nate's "This week in KDE" series is one of my favorite reads on planet.kde.org.

Incidentally, it was Nate's patch that enabled pkexec'ing dolphin back in 18.08 (although it might have been inadvertent, as the main goal was to re-enable dolphin to run on a true root session, where the security effect of blocking dolphin is rather negligible..but it also made pkexec possible), so he is the one to thank for the possibility of running dolphin as root currently (without modifying the source ).

[TWPonKubuntu]

Ahha! Now I know who to thank for pkexec!
and thank you Kubicle for that info.

[kubicle]

Ahha! Now I know who to thank for pkexec!
and thank you Kubicle for that info.

In case you're interested: https://phabricator.kde.org/D12795

Right, this patch just re-enables running Dolphin as the actual root user (not sudo/kdesu) to fix Kali and other legitimate root user use cases. PolKit support in KIO is definitely the preferred solution for when using Dolphin with a normal user account.

(The polkit support should be somewhat closer than "on the horizon" now.)

[TWPonKubuntu]

Progress is being made... I'll hang on and see what this change actually feels like when it gets here...

[BarryHavenga]

Fstab Edit

Nice to see this development of Dolphin.

I came to this tread because I needed to rename the mount point of a partition.
Editing /etc/fstab with Kate was easy enough but I had trouble remembering the the command sequence for a root rename.

Eventually I used Krusader and although it would not allow the rename it did allow me to enter a new mount point.

Btw, dbus-x11 is present on 20.04...

Hi. If you are running KDE you can edit fstab easily with Kate. After amending the mount point, Kate will now automatically request your root password if required by the ownership/directory rights of the target directory in this case /etc/.