Hello everyone,

I actually don't know if this is the right place to ask these questions, but at least it seems to be the best fit in my opinion. I'm using KDE neon and recently upgraded to the 18.04 based version and I'm into two small hassles which I did not manage to work in the way I want them to:

1. In particular, I'm using a dual boot setup with Windows 10. For this I'm using a custom script that mounts different partitions during system boot time as I needed more configuration options than available by editing my fstab. I called this script at boot time using SysVinit until the 18.04 release, but this seems to be deprecated and systemd should be used instead. So I tried to create the service unit accordingly and the best option I found has been:

Code: Select all

[Unit]
Description=my service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/path/to/myscript.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target


In this setting it works as with SysVinit, however the script is called somehow too late as my data directories in home are only symlinks pointing to one of the mounted partitions and these are not available at a required point during boot / login such that my data directories are reset to /home/<me> all the time. To prevent this I had to set 'enabled=False' in /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf. But still I am interested in clean solution without such workarounds. I think it has to be done with a certain Before/After/Requires/Wants/WantedBy configuration but I tried a bunch of different ones (for instance local-fs.target and sysinit.target) but none of these worked in the way as the previous version running SysVinit, either the script is not executed properly (partitions are not mounted at all) or my data directories are reset without editing user-dirs.conf...

2. My second issue is due to the replacement of gksu in 18.04. I used gksu to start GTK apps requiring root permissions (in particular only GParted and GSmartControl - I know that GUI apps should usually not be run as root but these two have to be). Unluckily running GUI apps as root under KDE messes up the application themes which worked like a charm with gksu -k option. Without gksu I'm using pkexec instead, but whatever I try and whatever environment variables I supply (e.g. 'pkexec env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR gparted'), the apps always fall back to the ugly default theme when started from the KDE kickoff. They look right when simply started from a terminal with 'sudo gparted', but changing the kickoff starter to this command does not work, no password prompt window opens. Clearly, this is just an aesthetic issue but I still want to fix it... How is this possible?

I searched for hours through the web to fix these two issues, but unluckily without a working solution. So I finally decided to ask here.

Thanks in advance!