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Can't mount USB devices, shut down etc. as a user

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 4124 / 2 Years ago, sun, august 21, 2022, 4:40:34

I tried gnome3 and gnome3-staging ppas to test running Gnome 3.8. After a while I decided that Gnome 3.8 wasn't for me, so I did a ppa-purge of both the ppas. As described in gnome3-staging ppa page, I also did:

$ sudo apt-get purge libpam-systemd

$ sudo apt-get install libpam-xdg-support

The trouble is, I can't mount my external USB device anymore. When I try to mount it as a user, it fails:

$ udisks --mount /dev/sdc1 

Mount failed: Not Authorized

I am logged in an XFCE session, but the same thing happens in a fallback Gnome session, or from a Unity session. Also, in XFCE, "suspend" and "shut down" menus are grayed out.

I can't also open synaptic package manager from XFCE menus (sudo synaptic works).

After a lot of searching, it seems like it is a policykit issue. I see the following in my ~/.xsession-errors:

(polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:5805): polkit-gnome-1-WARNING **: Unable to determine the session we are in: No session for pid 5805

PID 5805 doesn't exist. If I try to start polkit-dnome-authentication-agent-1 from an xterm, I get the same error (different PID):

$ /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1

...

(polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:15971): polkit-gnome-1-WARNING **: Unable to determine the session we are in: No session for pid 15971

(the ... lines are warnings from GTK about missing css files etc.).

polkitd is running:

$ pidof polkitd

1495

Is there something I am missing?

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damomnning

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answered 2 Years ago nguai · Accepted Answer

After a lot of searching, I decided to reinstall policykit-1 package. When I did sudo apt-get install --reinstall policykit-1, I got a message saying that the package could not be installed because it wasn't available in the repository (sorry about the lack of the exact message!).

So, an I ran:

apt-cache policy $(dpkg -l | awk 'NR >= 6 {print $2}') | less

This showed me that a bunch of packages had versions like 0.105-1ubuntu1pitti2, whereas the available version from Ubuntu repositories were something like 0.105-1ubuntu1. It seems like gnome3 ppa pulled packages from this ppa.

So, I ran the following command (the names of the packages are the ones that had the pitti versions installed):

sudo aptitude install dbus=1.6.8-1ubuntu6 dbus-x11=1.6.8-1ubuntu6 gir1.2-polkit-1.0=0.105-1ubuntu1 libdbus-1-3=1.6.8-1ubuntu6 libdbus-1-3:i386=1.6.8-1ubuntu6 libdbus-1-dev=1.6.8-1ubuntu6 libpolkit-agent-1-0=0.105-1ubuntu1 libpolkit-backend-1-0=0.105-1ubuntu1 libpolkit-gobject-1-0=0.105-1ubuntu1

The above command installed the official Ubuntu repository versions of the packages. The version numbers come from the output of apt-cache policy command above. And now everything is working.