I am attempting to run nautilus as root but when I run "sudo nautilus" from the terminal, I get the following error:
error: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set in the environment.
(nautilus:9341): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
The issue does not occur when I attempt to run nautilus as non-root. I am using ubuntu 14.04. Does anyone know how I can fix this?
14 Answers
When you run software as another user you're in fact starting a new minimal isolated environment that doesn't carry on some "excessive" variables (among others variables responsible for injecting libraries or setting privileges). Replace your sudo nautilus call with the following - it will carry on user-specific X server settings from the current session:
pkexec env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY nautilusThis is a one time low level solution but it will work on a misconfigured machine. If you want to permanently "fix your sudo" you need to find the issue with your environment configuration and correct it as described in other answers.
If you are getting this error in Docker ; this is what I do
# sudo xhost +
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
# export DISPLAY=:0.0
# docker run -it --env DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY --privileged --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix .. rest of your Docker arugmentsI also had the same problem on Ubuntu 14.04. Open terminal by pressing,
Ctrl + Alt+ T
then sudo visudo
change the line
Defaults env_keep="https_proxy"
to
Defaults env_keep += "https_proxy"
It worked like charm.
0To make it easy - more explained the new booting of my system.
After all explanations here I came to the result - and "env" in terminal said already that is right for these session:
These two rows to use the environment variable:
for the tmp behavior I have chosen:
mkdir -pv ~/.cache/xdgr
For setting the environment variable:
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$PATH:~/.cache/xdgr
After closing the terminal and a new open for the recall of env they tells:
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1001
note: it is ok for the user under ubuntu, root need more (last info by term - with 0700 permissions)
