Fast user switching - or other

[David Timms]

Gerry Tool wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 16:52 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 01:51 +0100, Marcin Grabda wrote:
>>> It is really disappointing. Windows XP has such feature since 5 years. 
>>> Couldn't we provide option to disable/enable this when needed? Removing 
>>> it is not a good way. 
>> Windows XP does a lot of really really ugly things that we shouldn't
>> copy.  This being one of them.
>>
> I agree.  User switching should not even be in Windows XP.  It causes a
> lot of confusion with laziness being the most usual reason for using it.

I find that when admin'ing a machine that the ability to tell a GUI tool 
that I want it to start with root rights would be handy. My current 
method is invike a terminal, su - in that terminal, then start the app, 
in background.

I know that some apps (I guess ones that are marked as being useless 
without root access), invoke the ~"please give root password" dialog.
Is there already a nice way to start other programs (most common example 
for me: nmapfe and gnome-terminal) as root (or even another user) ?

DaveT.