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I just had ubuntu installed on my laptop last week. last night I noticed an icon of a key pop up in my system tray for just a short period of time. when I clicked on it, it said something about setting permissions but it didn't take me anywhere. what is this?

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2 Answers

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The key icon is to symbolise that one or more of the applications are running with sudo permissions.

This is normal if you are installing anything new, or you were system updating.

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up vote 1 down vote

To add to this, if you have a password to log on to your system, it would display after typing in that password. As Nick mentioned, your using sudo permissions at that point.

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ok, but I wasn't installing or updating and I hadn't just logged on. I was actually just talking on the phone and glanced up and noticed it. the only thing I was doing on the comp was browsing around trying to find some sort of hardware manager... – cheryl Aug 10 '11 at 2:52
I imagine at that time, your system may have been updating. – Jeebs Aug 11 '11 at 1:41
updating what? wouldn't that require some sort of connection? – cheryl Aug 12 '11 at 7:28
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