On Sun, 6 May 2012, Max Shinn wrote: > On Sun, 6 May 2012 03:45:30 -0500 (CDT) Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > >> I was using "sudo synaptic" to get that error, but if I use simply >> "synaptic", then it runs, but it notes that I do not have root >> permissions. > > I always use gksudo or kdesudo when starting graphical applications as > root. Maybe just using "sudo" could have been part of the problem? > > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo#Graphical_sudo That's a good guess, and there were a lot of suggestions about gksu and gksudo on the Ubuntu pages when I looked for solutions, but that didn't help at all. It was always the same error with any of these commands: sudo synaptic gksudo synaptic gksu synaptic Or with this too: sudo su - synaptic Nothing worked, but rebooting solved the problem immediately. There must have been something a little off in one of the packages I installed and it didn't tell me I had to reboot, probably because it wasn't supposed to require a reboot. After rebooting, this works fine: sudo synaptic Mike