Installation and administrative privileges required!

[hoopahmadness]

Bug Description

When I try to set a password or enable headless mode with sudo rustdesk ... I still get "Installation and administrative privileges required!"

This is using the binary generated by building from source via docker. I am trying to install the client on a remote server so that I may use it headlessly from my desktop.

How to Reproduce

• Build from source
• move binary to PATH
• non-admin commands work, e.g. rustdesk --get-id
• admin commands fail, e.g.

$ sudo ~/bin/rustdesk --password mypass
[2025-07-25T02:31:21Z INFO  librustdesk::core_main] main start args: ["--password", "mypass"], env: Args { inner: ["/home/steve/bin/rustdesk", "--password", "mypass"] }
Installation and administrative privileges required!

(had to use the relative path to binary because sudo doesn't see it in PATH)

Expected Behavior

sudo'd commands should run properly with admin privileges.

Operating system(s) on local (controlling) side and remote (controlled) side

Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64

RustDesk Version(s) on local (controlling) side and remote (controlled) side

1.4.1 (pulled source today)

Screenshots

n/a

Additional Context

No response

[open-trade]

check if sudo whoami == root and why not?

[open-trade]

or run sudo -u root rustdesk --password.

[hoopahmadness]

sudo whoami does return root.

I wonder if there is more to this than just running the executable. After taking a step back I realized that I don't necessarily need to build from source and tried downloading the latest .deb. So far everything I've described above does work with the application after being installed from deb.

Since I've found a workaround I'm content for now...I just wish I could figure out how to get the source build working.

[KMACEL]

@hoopahmadness Hi.

When I examined the code, I saw this line: "crate::platform::is_installed()". This condition checks whether the RustDesk folder exists under /usr. If you move RustDesk there and run it from that location, your issue should be resolved.

pub fn is_installed() -> bool { if let Ok(p) = std::env::current_exe() { p.to_str().unwrap_or_default().starts_with("/usr") || p.to_str().unwrap_or_default().starts_with("/nix/store") } else { false } }

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/blob/bdc5cded221af9697eb29aa30babce75e987fcc9/src/core_main.rs#L258C20-L258C51