Users can be confronted with the need to change ownership of a drive. One obviously can use the terminal, but is there currently a supported way to change ownership using a graphical tool in Ubuntu with Gnome Shell?
I regularly see questions of users on how to do that (e.g. after reformatting their drive to the ext4 file system), and I hate to have to recommend them to use sudo -H nautilus. 1) It is not a proper way to run graphical applications as root ; 2) modern trends are never to run the graphical applications as such as root (for example, "Disks" application).
We used to be able to run gksudo nautilus, which allowed to run nautilus as root without the risk of breaking user configuration. We do not have gksudo anymore. Instead, there is pkexec, but Ubuntu does not come with a policy file in place. So this option is not out of the box available to users.
The officially supported way to perform root actions with graphical tools such as nautilus and gedit is to use the "admin://" URI. With the command
nautilus admin://
one can open nautilus and perform actions that require root permissions. As such, one can change permissions of files from a different owner. However, the properties dialog does not allow to change the user of a file or directory.
Hence the question: "is there currently a supported way to change ownership using a graphical tool in Ubuntu with Gnome Shell?".
0 Answers