Doesn't work with Nautilus 3.24

[ceyhunn]

No description provided.

[brunonova]

I just tried it with the current daily live ISO of Ubuntu 17.10 with Nautilus 3.14.1, and it worked fine.

Have you restarted Nautilus after installing the extension? (nautilus -q)

[ceyhunn]

Sorry for that, I had to give more info. With gnome-xorg, it is OK. Problem with Gnome Wayland, it gives following error:

Can not open display :0

[brunonova]

Oh, Wayland. I never used Wayland, so I know little about it.

Apparently it isn't possible to run graphical applications under a different user (like root) under Wayland:

This is caused by Wayland not allowing processes run as a different user
to display on the desktop. Therefore using "su" or "sudo" to display a
graphical application doesn't work.

So I guess this extension simply can't work under Wayland!
I'll close this bug, since I don't think it can't be fixed.

But I think Nautilus (and Gedit) now have some support to do some tasks as root, so this extension may no longer be needed in the future.

[ceyhunn]

I understood. Thanks for your answer!!

[brunonova]

And thank you for reporting this!

[ceyhunn]

Hi @brunonova ,
I make your extension work on Gnome-Wayland. Adding environment variable XDG_RUNTIME_DIR of current user like

pkexec   env XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR nautilus
pkexec   env XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR gedit

solves the problem. That's why I did some changes in nautilus-admin.py for nautilus and gedit:

 cmd = [PKEXEC_PATH]
 cmd +=['env','XDG_RUNTIME_DIR='+os.environ['XDG_RUNTIME_DIR']]
 cmd +=[NAUTILUS_PATH]
 cmd +=['--no-desktop',uri]
 subprocess.Popen(cmd)
 #subprocess.Popen([PKEXEC_PATH, NAUTILUS_PATH, "--no-desktop", uri])

 cmd = [PKEXEC_PATH]
 cmd +=['env','XDG_RUNTIME_DIR='+os.environ['XDG_RUNTIME_DIR']]
 cmd +=[GEDIT_PATH]
 cmd +=[uri]
 subprocess.Popen(cmd)
 #subprocess.Popen([PKEXEC_PATH, GEDIT_PATH, uri])

[brunonova]

Thanks!
I have added your changes to the extension.

I can't really test it now, so I'll take your word for it that it works.

[ceyhunn]

@brunonova, but there are some tiny problems in org.freedesktop.nautilus-admin.policy like pkexec messages. I don't know them very well.

[brunonova]

What messages are you referring to?

[ceyhunn]

@brunonova ,
Example: Your Nautilus Message - Authentication is required to run the File Manager as Administrator like this - Authentication is needed to run /usr/bin/env as the superuser.

[brunonova]

Oh, right! pkexec is now running env instead of nautilus, so the policykit file no longer applies.
I'll take a look at this tomorrow.

[brunonova]

I don't think there's another way to preserve environment variables with polkit besides using that env trick, but then the policykit file no longer applies.
I have reverted the change.

Try running:

xhost +local:
pkexec nautilus --no-desktop

To see if this works to open Nautilus as root under Wayland.
You can also try the other workarounds mentioned in:

• https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/101641/run-gedit-as-root-in-wayland/
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451