gnome-sudo, a solution to the GUI su(1) problem

["Eric Gillespie, Jr." <epg progeny com>]

gnome-sudo is a GUI frontend to sudo(8) we developed at Progeny
to allow end-users to run our GUI admin tools without having
to open up terminal emulators and su.  I have seen a few other
solutions to this problem (such as gnome x-su), but they either
re-implement su(1) or make silly things like setuid root GNOME
programs.

gnome-sudo is different in that it is simply a frontend to sudo.
This has at least two benefits: dangerous code is isolated to
sudo, a well-known and trusted program, and we get to take
advantage of sudo's caching, so if the user needs to run
multiple programs as root in quick succession (think clicking
through the Control Center spawing 5 different capplets), she
won't have to enter the root password repeatedly.

The disadvantage is that /etc/sudoers must be configured before
this program can work.  Installation systems will have to add
the user to /etc/sudoers and we will need a GUI configuration
program for future modification of the file.

We hope this will be useful to the GNOME project.

Source:
http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/gnome-sudo/

Debian i386 and ia64 packages (also uploaded to unstable):
http://hackers.progeny.com/~epg/gnome-sudo/

-- 
Eric Gillespie, Jr. <*> epg progeny com
Software Developer
Progeny Linux Systems - http://progeny.com
"I don't know what a Sawfish Window Manager is."