KDE-Forum.org

I'm having trouble with inter-process authentication in KDE 3.4 on Kanotix (although I've seen it on other distros, too).

Here are the symptoms:

- Sometimes (no rhyme or reason) when I kdesu, I receive an error saying, "Unable to enable inter-process communications for KDE. Authentication Rejected, reason: Non of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed."

- I am unable to access "Administrator Mode" in any of the kcontrol modules

- When I run Konqueror in root-mode in my user account, I stumble across errors and problems starting processes. For instance, I *sometimes* cannot type "media:/" in the location bar, because the media service is not running. But it works find in my user account (and it worked fine just now in a root-mode konqueror, as I tried to get the error message syntax).

I've tried deleting the .ICEauthority file in my user account, but this did no good. Any other ideas?

Replying to my own post here for the sake of documentation...

Apparently something got hosed in my user account. I simply logged out and logged in as root, changed the password on the user account, and all was well. I was even able to change it back to the original password after logging in once with the new password.

Just another testimonial as to why running as root is a bad idea. If I'd not had a clean root account, I would not have been able to fix this.

Disable? No.

Break? Yes.

Note that I didn't disable my user account. There simply was an authentication problem within KDE related to my user account. Granted, the root account cannot have authentication problems, per se...but things can go wierd sometimes.

Bottom line: in my experience, I've been glad I've not run as root at least a few times. I'd recommend it to all my users. And I'd especially recommend it on less safe OS environments (like Windoze--true, no actual "root" account there, but damage can be more controlled by not running as "Administrator")