[SOLVED] Getting problems with opening /boot/grub/grub.conf

[Ariya]

# gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

(gedit:1537): EggSMClient-WARNING **: Failed to connect to the session manager: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported

** (gedit:1537): WARNING **: Could not connect to session bus

What does the above lines mean, and how to open such a file as /boot/grub/grub.conf in gedit?

Thanks!

Which version of Fedora are you using? You really shouldn't be editing grub.conf directly on F16 or F17.

[Ariya]

Fedora 17 Gnome.

There is no grub.conf actually in Fedora 17, but /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and I won't edit that, but /etc/grub.d/40_custom.
Of course, I installed Nano, so this is not a serious problem for me, but Gedit should open through the terminal.

[marko]

gedit is a GUI application, it will not open properly from a root terminal unless you became root via the "su -" command
(note the dash, it's important), su by itself will not work

Nano is a console only application and so it doesn't care if you drop the '-' option on su

[Ariya]

Thanks!
It worked. But what is this - after su?
Is it like sux or something special for Fedora?

[marko]

the "-" means to make the shell a login shell, that is, for whoever user the target is, it will read in the profile files like .bash_profile, .bashrc or whether the files are depending in the shell (for example tcsh would use .tcshrc and .login). This is not Fedora specific, pretty much any unix like Solaris will use "su - <username>" or "su --login <username>" where if the <username> option is missing is consider to be 'root'

Since the default is to consider the user target to be root when you don't actually type in the name,

su -

means "switch user to root and make it a login shell"

A more verbose, obvious way to do this is:

su --login root

see the "man su" for more info:

man su
....
DESCRIPTION
Change the effective user id and group id to that of USER.

-, -l, --login
make the shell a login shell

[Ariya]

Thank you so much!