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If you want an application that needs root permissions to ask for your user password instead for root password, you can create a polkit rule.

You probably use sudo to execute a command with root permissions. You can achieve the same on GUI applications with Polkit. By default, a graphical app that requires root permissions will prompt you for root password unless your user belongs to ‘wheel’ group. You can add a Polkit rule to include ‘sudo’ group to the administrator identities (you can also include your user to ‘wheel’ group if you prefer).

You need root permissions to follow these steps:

  1. First, ensure that polkit is installed.
  2. Go to /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d and copy 50-default.rules to a new file called 40-default.rules (you can use another name as long as you use a number less than ‘50’ at the beginning and keep the ‘.rules’ suffix).
  cp 50-default.rules 40-default.rules
  1. Edit the new file and change wheel for sudo at the end.
  polkit.addAdminRule(function(action, subject) {
      return ["unix-group:sudo"];
  });
  1. Save the file.

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