I'm not sure who you're asking now, but in case it's me, I'll answer what I'm trying to do.

We have 2 machines that can be used by anyone onboard, and I would like to secure them a little bit so that the users can't easily mess them up. So I have turned on auto-login and plan to not write down the password on the monitors since then they can do whatever they want using sudo. I have set a root password so that I can su to root in a terminal. I can do some things from the terminal, but some things are easier to do using a GUI, so I would need to be able to start the programs from the terminal. I don't know if this is the correct way to do things, but it's worked up until now...

Stig