The conversation with "su" has failed

[Snowhog]

It means it isn’t something in your users home directory; it’s something in the system.

Is your system on two partitions; one partition for / (root) and one partition for /home? If ‘yes’, you might want to consider just reinstalling 24.04 and not formatting the /home partition.

[Supersayano]

I can't reinstall the system.
/home is on the same partition as the system. It took me days or rather weeks to install and configure everything and I can't lose all that work if it isn't for a major reason.

Is what is causing this error so bad or dangerous? And if so, is there no way to solve it without reinstalling the system?
Greetings...

[Snowhog]

The highest likelihood is that what you are experiencing is isolated and as far as you know, just to the two items. Why it’s happening is (so far) a mystery. But if everything else operates as expected, and you really don’t want to reinstall, don’t lose sleep over it.

[Supersayano]

At the moment, as far as I know, it only affects applications that show a dialog box in which the box to remember the password appears, as is the case with Grub Customizer or the driver manager opened from the system tools.

Isn't there a way to create a launcher for the driver manager and Grub Customizer that shows this other type of dialog box without the remember password box?

In any case... isn't there a way to fix this without having to completely reinstall the system?
Thanks and regards...

[jlittle]

Isn't there a way to create a launcher for the driver manager and Grub Customizer that shows this other type of dialog box...

Yes, there is. One makes an executable script, for example .local/bin/sudopass.sh,

#!/bin/bash
kdialog --password 'sudo wants a password'

The environment variable SUDO_ASKPASS is set to point to that script. Then a launcher or another script uses sudo -A.

I use the KDE menu editor to make launchers (because an entry in the menu holds on to the launcher; items on the desktop or a panel get trashed easily). With that, there's a place to set the environment variable, the "Program:" is "sudo", and the "Command-Line Arguments:" are "-A software-properties-qt".

For an example of a script, my-software-props.sh:

#!/bin/bash
export SUDO_ASKPASS=~/bin/sudopass.sh
sudo -A software-properties-qt

The launcher now starts that script.

These scripts might be seen as security holes, so they should be not writeable by others.

[Supersayano]

Thank you very much, it's just what I wanted. Although it must be said that it took me a bit to get it to work because you made a mistake when creating the "my-software-props.sh" script. As you can see, the path it contains is incorrect because you wrote "~/bin/sudopass.sh" while the correct path should be "~.local/bin/sudopass.sh". I went back and forth a thousand times when I saw that it didn't work, until I realized the error in the path since the ".local" folder is missing.

On the other hand, I was also a little confused by the fact that it does not mention at all the path where to put the script "my-software-props.sh". In the end I decided to try putting it in the same path as the "sudopass.sh" script, that is, in "~.local/bin" and it worked perfectly. I haven't tried putting it in other paths, so I don't know if I got it right by chance or if it would have worked by putting it in any folder.

I also decided to change the command that the script pointed to so that instead of pointing to "software-properties-qt" it points to "kubuntu-driver-manager" which seems more correct for what I wanted.

And another thing that I changed in the "sudopass.sh" script is the text displayed in the dialog box, changing "sudo wants a password" to "Se requiere la contraseña de sudo." since my native language is Spanish.



In short, in the end this is exactly how the 3 scripts that I put in "/home/julio-cesar/.local/bin" turned out.

sudopass.sh:

#!/bin/bash
kdialog --password 'Se requiere la contraseña de sudo.'

admin-drivers.sh:

#!/bin/bash
export SUDO_ASKPASS=~/.local/bin/sudopass.sh
sudo -A kubuntu-driver-manager

grub-customizer.sh:

#!/bin/bash
export SUDO_ASKPASS=~/.local/bin/sudopass.sh
sudo -A grub-customizer

Thank you again for your invaluable help. At least this way I no longer have to always see that error dialog box that was making me sick.
And if you ever think of something or have any information that could be useful to solve the problem itself, please don't forget to write another message in this thread (I will receive a notification from the forum letting me know about it), or if past some time the thread ends up closing, please contact me by private message.
Thanks for everything and greetings...