Question

I am working on a kiosk gui, written in ruby/gtk and using ubuntu. I’d like to be able to reboot from within the ruby/gtk gui — specifically, I want to let people who swipe administrative cards choose to reboot the machine as one of their administrative options. I do not want to give these users root access more generally. Is there a way to do one of the following:
1) reboot from command line without root permission, or
2) change/reduce the level of permission required to reboot from command line so I can let people click on a button to reboot without worrying about their broader access to the system, or
3) (I doubt this is possible) perhaps somehow from within gtk or however programmatically log in to root to use the reboot command without exposing the password to anyone who can view the source code.

Answer 1

You could configure your user to be allowed to use the shutdown command via sudo. That would probably do what you want.