I found the post in [DNG] where Didier Kryn has posted a small wrapper program in C, which looks like pkexec but runs sudo for commands or udevil for mount/umount requests.
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/2 … ea.en.html
I copied this and compiled it and as root copied the binary to /usr/local/bin. Then I installed ssh-askpass and udevil. After setting up

Path askpass /usr/bin/ssh-askpass

in /etc/sudo.conf I was then able to run gparted from the launch menu.

I then had a look at which file managers could use udevil to mount removable devices under /media :-

SpaceFM auto-detects udevil and uses it.
xfe you can manually enter a command such as "udevil mount /dev/sdc1".
PCManFM I can't see how to get it to use udevil unless it is to do with "Modules".
Thunar does not appear to allow custom commands to mount media. It requires HAL to do the mounting.

So SpaceFM seems to work well for the mounting and un-mounting, although I didn't really like the layout of the files as it did not seem to offer the dates of the files, which can be really useful if you want to copy a block of files somewhere else. I suppose that I could use SpaceFM to look after the mounts and then use PCManFM to move stuff about!

Geoff

Yes, it does ;-) When I suggested using su as a work round, I was including gksu, which is the form I normally use. I thought that I had read that gksu was deprecated and on my testing/Ascii machine it became removed.

Geoff

Summary

This is a summary of what I did  to upgrade from Debian Jessie to Devuan Jessie. The result of this is a machine running LXDE, with most things working normally. Shutdown from the logout menu is working.

I will update this message as necessary.

The desktop machine had been running Debian Jessie for a long time with many applications installed as well as some desktops, including XFCE and LXDE.

The following is the equivalent of what I actually did, reconstructed from the log files
and more or less follows the instructions for XFCE given by Chillfan
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=67#p67

As root comment out all of the entries in sources.list and add the Devuan repository entries.
As I had previously added contrib and non-free, I kept these here.

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie main contrib non-free 
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-updates main contrib non-free 
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-security main contrib non-free 

Log into the console as root (maybe you need <ctl><alt><F1> to get to the console).

Now update the cache and get the Devuan keyring. Once this is installed the packages will be authenticated.

apt-get update
apt-get install devuan-keyring -y --allow-unauthenticated
apt-get update -y

Now install the Devuan packages and remove systemd. The purges will remove a large number of packages incluidng LXDE and XFCE as well some Gnome applications and parts of LibreOffice.

apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoremove --purge
apt-get purge systemd-shim libsystemd0
apt-get autoremove

Now put back LXDE and a display manager as well as putting back the missing parts of LibreOffice.

apt-get install lxde slim
apt-get install policykit-1 upower
apt-get install libreoffice libreoffice-gtk
apt-get purge sysvinit gnome-mplayer

If you now reboot, Slim should start and let you log in to your previous LXDE set-up.

(Edit: the next section was edited in later, from postings below)

To make sure that you can shutdown the machine from the logout menu, enable it in polkit/consolekit as described by Paweł Cholewiński in,
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/2 … 34.en.html
thus, as yourself :-

cat << EOF > /tmp/consolekit.pkla
[restart]
Identity=unix-user:`whoami`
Action=org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart
ResultAny=yes

[stop]
Identity=unix-user:`whoami`
Action=org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop
ResultAny=yes

[hibernate]
Identity=unix-user:`whoami`
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultAny=yes

[suspend]
Identity=unix-user:`whoami`
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.suspend
ResultAny=yes
EOF

and as root

cp /tmp/consolekit.pkla /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/

While the above uses polkit, on the grounds that it works, the following tries to avoid polkit/dbus as there can be problems with lxpolkit failing to register itself.

Use the small wrapper program in C which Didier Kryn has posted on [DNG], which looks like pkexec but runs sudo for commands or udevil for mount/umount requests. udevil and ssh-askpass also need to be installed and sudo.conf set-up.

As yourself, copy the C code from
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/2 … ea.en.html
It is probably easier to cut and paste the code into your favourite editor, rather than saving the web page and then editing out the HTML! Save it into a file called pkexec.c in a suitiable working subdirectory and then give the command

make -k pkexec
# then as root :-
cp pkexec /usr/local/bin
apt-get install ssh-askpass udevil

cat << EOF2 >> /etc/sudo.conf
# Specify the GUI helper program to read the password
Path askpass `which ssh-askpass`
EOF2

It is assumed that /usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin and /bin in your path.
Test that it works with :-
pkexec gparted
Then you can try running gparted from the launch menu.

udevil can be used by some file managers to mount removable devices under /media. SpaceFM seems to work well and will detect udevil and use it for mounting removable devices. Some of the other SpaceFM configurations are not set this up in the preferences from the menus at the top, but by right clicking on a file in the display panel and then, say, selecting view>columns where you can select which attributes to display. I think that the settings for each of the up to 4 file display panels is independent. It is probably a good idea to read the help for SpaceFM.

apt-get install spacefm

This should then have most of the normal stuff working. If on logging in you get a pop-up error message from GDBus about "Cannot determine user of subject" then you should be able to get rid of it by disabling lxpolkit in "Default applications for LXSession" under "Core applications" and "Autostart".

What is it that runs the policy kit deamon, polkitd? It runs as root, but only seems to start when I first log in and is then persistent over subsequent logins.

Geoff

Policykit and lxpolkit are now working, although I am not entirely sure why!

Clearly lxpolkit requires policykit-1 although it is not given as a dependency. I believe that policykit runs as root and does all the clever authentication and permissions stuff, while lxpolkit runs as the user and acts as the interface to the user. Then there is the question of getting lxpolkit started by lxsession. lxsession-edit is used to set up the files. It finds them in /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop and if you change one it copies your own version over into ~/.config/autostart/. If things get too confused, you can delete the files in your own directory ~/.config/autostart/ and start again. You can run lxsession-edit from the launch menu as
Preferences>Default applications for LXSession
In the "Core applications" tab you must make sure that the polkit agent is lxpolkit.
In the "Autostart" tab LXPolkit is DISABLED, as this setting stops the pop-up error message.
I also have enabled the 4 gnome-keyring items :-
SSH Key Agent, Certificate and Key Storage, GPG Password Agent & Secret Storage Service.

If lxpolkit does not show up in lxsession-edit, then you can edit /etc/xdg/autostart/lxpolkit.desktop and change the line
Hidden=true
to be false. It will then show up and you can ensure that it is disabled.

Now, after a fresh reboot, I can run gparted or synaptic from the launch menu (with password checking) and the shutdown options work on the logout menu.

In debugging this I did try installing policykit-1-gnome, which did not pull in anything else much, and having set it up, I found that it produced the same errors as lxpolkit, so I went back to using lxpolkit.

There was some helpful stuff on the Rasberry Pi web site :-
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/q … n-start-up
as well as our friends at Arch Linux :-
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=144783

Geoff

I have had a look at "man slim" and you can indeed shutdown the system there by giving the username "halt". However, it does then prompt you for the root password, which I do know ;-) but my partner does not. I persuaded her that Linux was better than Windows by telling her that Penguin Solitaire was better than MS Solitaire. I think that I should not ask her to shutdown with this method, but with a nice tidy menu option.

Geoff

I was intending producing a summary of this thread, once I had got things in a satisfactory state. Assuming I succeed, you are most welcome to make any use of it.

Geoff

As I read it lxsession needs one of consolekit, upower or systemd, but not all of them and is running now without systemd. I do have a workround for the shutdown, although if there was a neater way of doing it that would be nice.

Geoff

Right! I have just installed libreoffice-gtk and it didn't pull in anything else and it has improved the look of the menus. I have now set the scaling back to 100% and it looks pretty good. Sorry for all of my ramblings.

Geoff

Thank you for all of your suggestions. I have now tried removing the second part of local.conf and it still improves the look of the LibreOffice pull down menus, although the font is still small. Unfortunately the pull down menus on the other software deteriorates, although it does not get smaller. I think that currently I will put up with the poorer LibreOffice menus for the sake of everything else. I suspect that this is a LibreOffice problem rather that LXDE or Devuan.

Geoff

Yes I have "upower 1:0.9.23-2+devuan1.2" installed. I notice from the reference, which you give, that someone reports that installing upower made the shutdown options appear with logout. I also notice that lxsession depends on "consolekit | upower (<0.99) | systemd". I am not too clear on version numbers, but does that mean that lxsession will not use the version of upower that I have installed?

Geoff

Thank you for your detailed reply.

I believe that I had followed your suggestions more or less. Purging systemd and libsystemd0 followed by an autoremove had removed lxde as well as xfce and gvfs as well as several gnome utilities. Re-installing lxde and slim pulled in consolekit and I have since re-installed upower. I have checked for the recommends, which you mention and none of them was present except gnome-mplayer, which I have now purged. As mentioned above gvfs is absent.

In browsing around for anything to do with systemd I only found sysvinit installed. At first I thought that this sounded good, until I realised that it is a transitional package for systemd. I have now purged that. I was a bit confused to not find systemd itself as un-installed, until I realised that the repository is Devuan's and therefore systemd is not there ;-) It does mean though that "apt-get purge systemd" does not work!

It seems to me that lxde is working happily without systemd or libsystemd0. The only problems which I am currently aware of are :-

Temporary mounting of usb devices such as camera/phone. I assume that used to be handled by gvfs and I have started to look at Thunar, which I think I saw mentioned in this context.

There is no GUI method to shutdown the system as lxde only allows logout/lock and slim does not have any options to shutdown. I have a quick kludge with xmessage and sudo.

There is an error pop-up on login :-
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown:
The name org.desktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided by any .service files

The poor fonts on the LibreOffice interface. This is not a major problem.

Geoff