Enter Your Password To Perform Administrative Tasks

[FirefoxRocks 0]

I know that Linux is much more customizable than Windows regarding the system and kernel itself. Now in my other post, I wanted to find out if I can trigger the UAC prompt for certain tasks. Since doing so is nearly impossible or would be very difficult or illegal according to Microsoft's End User License Agreement, I was hoping that this task could be achieved in Linux.

 

I am running Ubuntu 7.10 with the GNOME Desktop environment.

 

Now normally, I would need to type in my password to open things like Login Window, Network Manager, GNOME Partition Editor and things like that. How I would like to know if I can force the sudo prompt on the following tasks without executing the application as root!:

Clicking on a menu

Right clicking anywhere

Opening any application as a normal user

Shutting down, restarting, hibernating or suspending the computer

Opening any file or folder

Mounting a partition in Nautilus

Visiting a web page in Firefox, Opera or Konqueror

Basically doing anything...

If I can't get it on every one of the above tasks, I'll do as much as possible. I know that I can always be forced to enter my password by launching things via sudo in the terminal window. The thing is, I do not want to launch certain programs as root for obvious reasons, and certain applications shouldn't be run under root (e.g. Wine applications).And also, I want to see the graphical interface.

 

is there a way to achieve this behaviour on Linux?

[wutske 0]

FR, you are one weird dude . You could try PolicyKit to allow and disallow, but it'll take you a while to create a rule for everything

[Animator 0]

What you're looking for is known as a "kiosk" setup. You don't generally want to change the defaults of your standard OS to have all those useful features disabled... instead what you do is set the user to a kiosk, or low-privilege user. It's kind of the opposite to users who are / are not sudo enabled.

Now, you can probably achieve this kind of thing by playing with profiles and permissions (actually, another way is to chmod or chgrp the individual commands themselves in /usr/bin) but your job is made easier by apt-getting "kiosktool" or similar management program.

Just google "Ubuntu" and "kiosk" and you'll soon be heading in the right direction. I believe KDE (as opposed to Gnome) has one built in.

I haven't really read up in depth, though for Ubuntu 7.10, I thought this was a nice colourfully illustrated example: https://www.hugedomains.com/domain_profile.cfm?d=caffeinefueled&e=com


P.S. I think you should drop 7.10. Use the latest version when seeking support, and keep it up to date; the Ubuntu community just kind of works that way.

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

This is quite weird, but I'm not too sure it's going to be easy either. I know you can make a user that can't access any folders unless its a root user by chmoding all folders to 0744.Goodluck on this project,xboxrulz

[alnatih 0]

you can try changing your user to the root group,just follow this guide to do that and your user wil have root privileges https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-linux-add-user-to-group/


or

you can give the user specific privileges to ru the commands you need like in this guide
https://debian-administration.org/article/33/Giving_ordinary_users_root_privileges_selectively