did I goof? or did MX-KDE ghostbusters visit me??

[Belham]

Hi all,

Last week switched from regular MX-15 and went to the full KDE MX-15 desktop. Been using it a few days, really like it. Then today, I thought I'd run from the root terminal "APT-GET UPDATE && APT-GET UPGRADE".....just to check that the actual software updater inside MX is/was working. I've noticed from years of using Linux it never hurts to check up on updaters.

Well, it found three updates. Great! No biggie: they were "firefox", "libgd3" and "mx-usb-unmounter". I ran the updating, everything was great. But then all he!! broke loose inside the terminal. Best described by the screenshots below. Pic#1, the updates, everything looks & acts normal. Pic #2, updates finish. Then, when my root terminal line (root@luc:/home/luc#, pic#2) comes up implying everything is/was finished, without warning---and without me touching anything---the terminal automatically ran "kbuildsycoca4 running..." What?? What is kbuildsycoca crap?? Furthermore, how can something run, especially in terminal, without me actually entering the commands?!! I couldn't stop it midstream...... the terminal proceeded to go thru 17 full desktop screens worth of terminal lines, and has just now ended as showed in the third & 4th (final) pic. This is where it now rests. 17 full desktop screens worth of stuff flying by....I mean, holy crap I am not sure what happened....but I would appreciate any advice/hints/etc as to what I should do other than a shutdown like it is:

[Stevo]

Is this the KDE respin I did, or did you add KDE to MX yourself? It looks like my respin--which version is it? I've never seen it do anything like that on its own, myself.

[Belham]

Stevo,

Yes, it's your KDE respin (which I like very much).

Ok, I'll defer to your wisdom here and tell me what you think: I wonder if this is the reason that what happened actually did happen? I opened a fresh "root" terminal, entered my passphrase, the root terminal popped open, and then I immediately type "dolphin" into the terminal command line to bring up "dolphin" as root because there were some smal changes I needed to do to my version of conky. Completed those changes, then I thought "oh yeah, I wanted to check the updater against "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade". So I did that (from the same root terminal, after all it fell back to my terminal command line # just as if I had just opened it). Still, you think somehow I got KDE thinking something was wrong because this same terminal just had "dolphin" open (and then dolphin was closed)? Is that why it was trying to recreate the file var/tmp/kdecache-root/ksycoca4", and then began scanning everything possible related to it until it finally gave up hitting some sort of road block???


P.S. I ended up closing the terminal, went into the logs, and there is not one error message about this whole mess. That kind of freaks me out, but it seems everything is running great. I do not believe I can have any sort of malware or the sort, because I haven't even yet done anything on this fresh install, other than setup KDE how I like it, and do updates.

P.S2. and if you think it's best I should just wipe and reinstall, I can do that easily. I know the ISO I downloaded is good, both the sha and gpg checks were good. Could the downloading of those three updated files in apt-get update/apt-get upgrade somehow have brought bad stuff onto my system???? The internet and repositories and servers are getting weirder (and more hacked) every day.

[Utopia]

Can't the problem be that you're starting a GUI app (dolphin) from a terminal without using gksu? Usually fills up the terminal with lots of junk.
Henry

[Belham]

Can't the problem be that you're starting a GUI app (dolphin) from a terminal without using gksu? Usually fills up the terminal with lots of junk.
Henry

Henry,
Sure, that may be true in another Linux OS, where you need to run either gksu or kdesu or put the infamous "i" after sudo. But in this case, this is a built-in root terminal app inside kde by the MX team. It already has one of the three, if not all three, integrated into it. Its the whole idea of having a separate "root" terminal in the first place. And if I am wrong about this, then they have some explaining to do why they would create a "root" terminal separate launcher app only to have it open as if you just type "sudo" from a regular non-rot terminal. Lastly, even if a Linux user doesn't use gksu, kdesu or "i", no terminal, root and/or otherwise, can just launch its own command after it has finished running "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade". If you look at the pics, this is what happened. Also, it didn't produce junk....it was methodically re-creating and re-writing a whole swath of things that are relevant to the running of KDE. Let's see what Stevo or Dolphin_Oracle or Jerry think...they're the gurus & thus why they make the big bucks (j/k guys )

[lucky9]

I don't know about the respin, but I've always been told to use gtksu or kdesu for any GUI program.

[kmathern]

@Belham, was the kbuildsycoca4 a command you ran or did those messages just start appearing in the terminal window without any action on your part?

In the case of the later, it looks like it also happens with other distros, not just MX.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2098118
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=104819

[BitJam]

And if I am wrong about this, then they have some explaining to do why they would create a "root" terminal separate launcher app only to have it open as if you just type "sudo" from a regular non-rot terminal.

Usually the reason for having a root terminal app is to make it easy for people to run command-line commands as root without having to type "sudo" before each command. I don't think it is designed to make launching gui apps as root any easier. I normally use sudo to launch gui apps as root.

As for running kbuildsycoca4, this program rebuilds the KDE system configuration cache. Apt can be configured to trigger other programs after it is run so it seems reasonable for something like kbuildsycoca4 to run automatically after an apt-get upgrade. The only problem may be that its output is getting into your terminal window unexpectedly. It's possible someone put the triggered programs into the background without redirecting their output. This would explain what you saw. You would get a command prompt when apt finished but then the triggered programs would run sending their output to your terminal window. These kinds of errors occur frequently when developers run cli programs from within some fancy gui so they aren't aware of erroneous output sent to stdout or stderr.

I think this is probably a minor bug somewhere and not a serious issue. Since it is KDE based, only people running KDE would ever see it. If the bug was created recently then only people who did a recent apt-get upgrade would see it. If it gets fixed soon then it will disappear.

[skidoo]

http://mepiscommunity.org/wiki/system/root-access

gksu

MX Linux uses gksu to provide a graphical frontend to su that relies on the GTK libraries (as does Xfce itself). It sets HOME=~root, and copies .Xauthority to a tmp directory.
This prevents files in your home directory becoming owned by root. (The command gksudo also exists, but usually has an identical function.)

v. 20160102

The wiki page looks like it has been recently updated, but...
1) ? is "sux" still available (in either or both: antiX or MX)
2) wiki page states "Forum will generally instruct the use of su", but nowadays sudo seems to be mentioned nearly exclusively ("su" is seldom mentioned).
3) why mention gksudo, at all? For the sake of completeness? OK, but the unqualified "usually" needs to go.
Should state how/when gksudo will produce a differing result, if that's the case. (idunno how it could differ. In MX, isn't gksudo just a symlink back to gksu?)

When configuring a new system (with the hope of preventing later confusion) one of my first steps is to launch "lxappearance" AsRoot
and choose a gtk theme which is significantly different from the theme applied to normal user windows.
? "sudo vs gksu" matters b/c the former doesn't (or doesn't always) cause the "root user" theme to be applied? (maybe the result differs for MX and antiX in this regard)

I seldom delve into KDE, but I seem to recall a similar "gotcha" regarding use of kdesu vs sudo/su.
(foggy memory)(? executables for some kde apps reside in a path which is absent from root's path= env)

AFAIK, gksu results in root's environment variables being loaded and the .bashrc (et al) pathed under /root are used.
Behind the scenes, I don't know whether the "root terminal" launcher calls a different suid executable, or an executable which has been declared in sudoers, or ???
In any event, I believe the results are slightly different under antiX, compared to MX. To bring clarity, the wiki page should split the explanation(s) into two distinct sections.
A third "additional info" section might mention sux (for sake of completeness? If so, whaddabout gnsu and...) but is there much merit in doing so?

===========

for me, the condensed points of understanding are:
1) gksu "yields a result similar (identical?) to sudo -i, plus generation of a /tmp -pathed .Xauthority file"
2) sudo fails (as does sudo -i) when entered into gui runbox like gexec (Alt+F2) if an .Xauthority file is expected/required.
3) the result of supplying a password to the "Authentication Required" prompt differs, across distros (and, in antiX, is settable via the gksu-properties command)
4) pkexec ~= polkit ~= PolicyKit: ( askubuntu.com/questions/287845/how-to-configure-pkexec ) is something I seldom (never?) have to deal with, in antiX.
In MX, pkexec is employed in the launchers for synaptic, gparted, lightdm, grub-customizer (possibly others, I only found those 4)

[Belham]

Hi all,

Thanks for the responses. First off, yes, I had "googled" this. Second, is it possible there is confusion/misunderstanding about the MX ROOT terminal application inside MX_Linux from the menu? Mainly this: AS A USER YOU DO NOT HAVE THE OPTION TO TYPE IN "SU", "SUDO", "KDESU" OR "GKSU" WHEN OPENING IT. When using the MX "root" terminal application (launcher), a user clicks on in it the menu, and the first thing that pops up is a password box, demanding the type in their password. Yes? And after typing in the password, then the root terminal opens and you then are "root"----are you then supposed to again type in commands using "su", "sudo", "gksu", or "kdesu" aftr it has opened as "root"? That seems counterintuititve. Is it not reasonable that if this is an application launched as "root" from the menu, then after typing that password, that terminal should be opening up at a minimum as gksu or as the desktops (kde in this case) as "kdesu"? And if not, why have it? If that is the case, it should be nixed from builds and the menu, and all users should be told to use only the regular terminal is to be used, for everything, so then the appropriate prefix of root command (su, sudo, gksu, kdesu, etc) can be entered for what they are doing. (Bitjam & skidoo, thanks for writing what you both did, because it makes the most sense to me overall.)

Lastly, late last night I conducted two experiments. First, since it was a "fresh" install, I wiped it, completely blank the HD, and re-installed KDE MX-15 once again. I did exactly like I did the first time all this happened. I let it update, made the few desktop changes that I like inside KDE desktop, put my conky on, and then ran "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade", all from same "root" terminal opened (as had been done before). Result? The exact same thing happened, the root terminal did the update, found the the exact same three updates (somehow that the MX-15 updater didn't see these once again despite running it twice after installation was over). So, as soon as the updates were done, the root terminal from a command line took on its own life, so to speak (haha), and launched itself into the exact same thing that I posted first in this thread. So this behavior can be replicated.

Curious, I then grabbed a blank, new SD card, formatted it on another machine to Ext4, and installed the same KDE MX-15 to it. I followed everything once again exactly as above, with one key difference: I ran all my commands from the regular (non-root) terminal i.e. doing my conky via Dolphin, but noticeably (as when you use a regular terminal for opening Dolphin with gksu), it requires you to close that terminal and then re-open a new one if you want to do anything else. So, I did conky via dolphin changes, was forced to close that terminal when I closed Dolphin. Then I re-opened a new regular terminal immediately, then typed in "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade", and...lol...it found the same three upgrades that the KDE MX-15 Software Updater missed (aftr having run it twice after install), and the updates ran. After they were finished, this terminal fell back to a command line and sat there, like it is supposed to (at least visually, for the user, lol). Now, it is important to note I had opened "TASK MANAGER" from menu before doing the "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade", to see what going this route would produce. So as soon as the terminal was finished with the three updates, the task manager suddenly showed 2-3 new "root" PIDs running, and they wee all designated as kbuildsycoca4 -related. Kinda cool.

So, moral of the story---as a user, just never use the "root terminal" application from the KDE MX-15 terminal for anything. It will save you heartache, like thinking your system is either infected, corrupted or has been taken over by ghosts. Always use the regular terminal, and force yourself to remember the different commands when performing whatever you are doing. Just a shame, though, the "root" terminal application launchable as a menu item was such a neat idea, but it is only in theory, not in real-life application.

Thanks to all again that replied.