Sudo Gedit – Fix Can’t Open Gedit as Root

geditsudo

When I run sudo gedit /path/to/some/random/file I get the following error 

** (gedit:6262): WARNING **: Command line `dbus-launch --autolaunch=7f8731869e1c690b8205727e0000000a --binary-syntax --close-stderr' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.
Cannot open display: 
Run 'gedit --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

Using gksudo doesn't help either which returns 

Cannot open display: 
Run 'gedit --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

Any help guys. I need to have this capability to open files in Gedit as root.
I found this question with the same error but no solution Unable to launch gedit with sudo

EDIT
I found this post in Ubuntu Forums.
These are the instructions:

  1. echo $DISPLAY # you'll be needing this value 3 lines below
  2. sudo -i # or "su -" on older Slackwares
  3. xauth merge ~alien/.Xauthority # use your own username here instead of "alien"
  4. export DISPLAY=:0.0 # use the value of DISPLAY you've seen 3 lines before

On coming to command #3, I got this error
xauth: file /root/.Xauthority does not exist

Maybe this new info can shed more light.

Best Answer

Finally have found an answer. From this question Cannot connect to X Server when running app with sudo and especially this question Error when trying to run an app with sudo or gksudo.

I added the line Defaults env_keep+="DISPLAY" to the end of the visudo file at /etc/sudoers.

Yay, my sudo gedit is back!

EDIT

Got the same error again for sometime.

Did some more research, especially this answer https://askubuntu.com/a/137584/163331 and realized I had to add more options to the visudo file. Instead of Defaults env_keep+="DISPLAY", I used this line:

Defaults env_keep="XAUTHORIZATION XAUTHORITY TZ PS2 PS1 PATH LS_COLORS KRB5CCNAME HOSTNAME HOME DISPLAY COLORS"
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