Error message when working as 'root'

[Billy McCann]

Hello everyone.

It feels so good to be finally sitting behind a Debian OS machine. Ahhh....

I'm getting an error message when I try to do anything as root.

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

One spot I found advised to run

xhost +

to enable it, but I can't help but wonder if that is just a temporary bandaid. Even the person who gave this fix said that it wasn't advisable.

If I run

xhost +root

I get

xhost:  bad hostname "root"

What's causing this error?

Does anyone know of a permanent fix?

Any and all help is much appreciated.

Thanks,

Billy

[elsheikhmh]

i think

xhost +hostname

or

xhost +hostname:username

in your case localhost:root
check this post

[Billy McCann]

i think

xhost +hostname

or

xhost +hostname:username

in your case localhost:root
check this post

Thanks for the reply elsheikhmh. The "xhost +hostname" command seems to be a temporary fix. It goes away when you reboot.

A permanent fix is adding the line

export XAUTHORITY=/home/your_user_name/.Xauthority

to /etc/profile seems to keep the fix even after reboot. It worked for me, at least. (Be sure to replace the your_user_name with your user name. Like, mine is "billy".)

Something else that I didn't consider is to simply open the "Root Terminal" instead of just "Terminal". But it's kind of handy (to me, a noob) to be able to switch back and forth with a simple command in the same terminal window.