On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Mark Neidorff <m...@neidorff.com> wrote: > I'm running Jesse 8.6 with a KDE desktop. > > I get a desktop notification that there is one or more package updates > available. I select the package(s) and then I'm asked for authentication. I > type in the root password, but it is rejected. I also try my user password, > but that is also rejected. (Tried multiple times, so it doesn't seem to be a > typo problem) > > If I go to the command line--as root--and do apt-get update and upgrade, then > the update installs correctly. > > This sounds like something easy to fix, but I just don't know where to fix and > what fix to apply. Please let me know.
The technical term you are looking for is called "Privilege escalation". On a Debian system, "administrative" privileges are required to install/upgrade/remove packages. When you run the command as root, you have all the necessary privileges. A normal user does not have them enabled by default. This explains why the commands fail unless they are run as root. One possible approach (I am only guessing here and have not tested this) is to grant the necessary privileges to this user and see if the KDE application respects that. You can do this by modifying /etc/sudoers which is explained in https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch01.en.html#_sudo_configuration https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch04.en.html#_sudo https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.config-misc.html#sect.sharing-admin-rights The only caution is that /etc/sudoers can't be edited interactively in an editor. You need to use another program called visudo to do that. You can accomplish some really complex tasks by tweaking the sudoers configuration file (see man sudoers for all the gory details). But for your use case, granting ALL permissions to one normal user should probably be sufficient. hope that helps raju -- Kamaraju S Kusumanchi | http://raju.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Blog