Package: gksu Version: 2.0.2-9+b1 Severity: normal Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation? I was upgrading the testing distribution after several months using aptitude. I upgraded about half the packages, but when I went to upgrade the other half I received errors from dpkg: Preconfiguring packages ... dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)? I searched online and found the cause of the errors was, as the error states, the PATH being incorrect. I checked the PATH resulting when I chose "Root Terminal" from the menu, and this path did not include the sbin directories. root@ctillman:/home/chris# echo $PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games I tried sudo from a regular user terminal window to check the path which would come up with it: chris@ctillman:~$ sudo bash -c 'echo $PATH' /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin And then, because gksu starts Root Terminal, I tried the equivalent with gksu: chris@ctillman:~$ gksu "bash -c 'echo $PATH'" gksu-run: gksu/bash -c 'echo |usr|local|bin:|usr|bin:|bin:|usr|local|games:|usr|games'/5044-0-ctillman_TIME11346051 gksu-run: 1f53968cb8fe3d752131e6a334975c84 /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games This showed gksu is not changing the path when calling xfce4-terminal. My /etc/sudoers contents: root@ctillman:~# cat /etc/sudoers # # This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root. # # Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of # directly modifying this file. # # See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file. # Defaults env_reset Defaults mail_badpass Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin" # Host alias specification # User alias specification # Cmnd alias specification # User privilege specification root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL chris ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL # Allow members of group sudo to execute any command %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL # See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives: #includedir /etc/sudoers.d -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.17.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_NZ.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages gksu depends on: ii gconf-service 3.2.6-4.1 ii libatk1.0-0 2.28.1-1 ii libc6 2.27-5 ii libcairo2 1.15.10-3 ii libfontconfig1 2.13.0-5 ii libfreetype6 2.8.1-2 ii libgconf-2-4 3.2.6-4.1 ii libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 2.36.12-2 ii libgksu2-0 2.0.13~pre1-9+b2 ii libglib2.0-0 2.56.1-2 ii libgnome-keyring0 3.12.0-1+b2 ii libgtk2.0-0 2.24.32-2 ii libpango-1.0-0 1.42.4-1 ii libpangocairo-1.0-0 1.42.4-1 ii libpangoft2-1.0-0 1.42.4-1 ii libstartup-notification0 0.12-5 ii sudo 1.8.23-2 Versions of packages gksu recommends: ii gnome-keyring 3.28.2-1 gksu suggests no packages. -- no debconf information