QProcess Shell Command (Linux) Elevate Privileges?

[anda_skoa]

Clicking on setup from their GUI is what they recognize, and they expect a certain behavior from the setup.

Sure, nothing wrong with that. However, most installers on Windows do not elevate their priviledges themselves either, they usually also require that the user has permissions to install to a certain directory.

I intend to satisfy most of those expectations, but cannot set symlinks in $HOME/Desktop/ pointing to /usr/share/icons/<icon-size>/apps directory without elevating permissions.

As ChrisW67 said, if you can't write into the user's home directory then there is something seriously screwed with the user's system setup.

I can also not save a desktop.entry file in /usr/shar/applications/ without ditto elevation.

Of course, I would even consider that path "off-limits" to any 3rd party software installer. /usr is the path managed by the system itself. Like C:\Windows (or whatever it is on current versions).

For that reason I actually prefer 3rd party software to come with an installer (instead of trying to have a package), because it not only allows users to install non-system wide, it allows users who are trusted by the sysadmin to install system wide in a way (e.g. /opt, /usr/local) that does not interfere with the system itself.

Once files have been installed as superuser, I reset file permissions to local user with standard priviliges (don't forget my target audience is not Linux savvy - and doesn't know that files saved as superuser will have READ/WRITE/EXEC as superuser - which basically renders my program useless because they can't exec it with their credentials.

Are you sure? Usually executables installed by root are owned by user root, group root (unless the mount settings override that) but are executable for all.

So asking my target audience (non-linux-geeks) to elevate their privileges and protecting that user from installing files in places other than to which he himself has READ/WRITE permission is momentarily the best I can do. Unless you can suggest a better way...?

Which is the same as on Windows, no? You have to right-click and "run as administrator" to be able to install into a global locations.

Cheers,
_