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#1 2022-01-13 10:42:55

Tritonio
Member
Registered: 2022-01-09
Posts: 31  

[SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

After upgrading from Beowulf, all apps like synaptic, gparted and timeshift fail to launch from the whisker menu in XFCE. After some research I saw that all of them are probably using pkexec to launch which in turn is supposed to use polkit to show the password dialog for elevating privileges.

Which package is supposed to be the polkit agent for XFCE? Arch says it's xfce-polkit but that doesn't exist in the repos. I seem to have installed pokit-kde-agent-1, mate-polkit and mate-polkit-common but not mate-polkit-bin, and I see that I could install lxpolkit too. But since i'm running XFCE I don't think I should be using these.

Thank you.

Last edited by Tritonio (2022-01-13 11:22:35)

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#2 2022-01-13 12:02:41

fsmithred
Administrator
Registered: 2016-11-25
Posts: 2,409  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

Probably these two:
policykit-1-gnome
libpam-elogind

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#3 2022-01-13 12:06:30

Tritonio
Member
Registered: 2022-01-09
Posts: 31  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

Both are already installed. Maybe I need to run something? I don't see executables in these packages' installed files though.

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#4 2022-01-13 12:34:03

alexkemp
Member
Registered: 2018-05-14
Posts: 290  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

I run Chimaera-upgraded-from-Beowulf with XFCE. However, I have not had your problem, which does not help me to help you. However, in an attempt to help I ran with your report on polkit & searched in Synaptic for it; the single installed item was gir1.2-polkit-1.0 (GObject introspection data for PolicyKit), so that seems to be the one:

GObject introspection data for PolicyKit
 
PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling the policy that
allows unprivileged processes to speak to privileged processes.

This package contains introspection data for PolicyKit.

It can be used by packages using the GIRepository format to generate
dynamic bindings.

Added:

Taking this one step further by searching for PolicyKit, there is one further item installed: cups-pk-helper (PolicyKit helper to configure cups with fine-grained privileges):

PolicyKit helper to configure cups with fine-grained privileges
 
This package provides a PolicyKit helper to configure cups with
fine-grained privileges. For example, it's possible to let users
enable/disable printers without requiring a password, while still
requiring a password for editing printer settings.

Last edited by alexkemp (2022-01-13 12:42:30)

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#5 2022-01-13 14:00:12

Tritonio
Member
Registered: 2022-01-09
Posts: 31  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

Have I tried turning it off and on again? No I haven't. And I just did. And it works now.

I restarted because I thought the problem was that I was running my Xsession's dbus under a different group (with "sg") and indeed when I reverted to the original and restarted, it worked! But then I put it back to the different group and it still works. So I guess it simply needed a restart?? Alright... Maybe there was some polkit daemon that had died then.

Thank you all for the help! Once I verify it's working I'll mark it as SOLVED.

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#6 2022-01-13 19:53:27

rolfie
Member
Registered: 2017-11-25
Posts: 1,047  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

My experience is that a reboot past the last upgrade step clears away one or the other hickup with configurations that get lost during such a process.

rolfie

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#7 2022-01-14 17:14:57

chris2be8
Member
Registered: 2018-08-11
Posts: 264  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

It might be worth checking it still works after one or two more reboots before you mark it as solved. I've see strange things happen too often to trust software to always do what you expect.

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#8 2022-01-14 17:26:04

EDX-0
Member
Registered: 2020-12-12
Posts: 53  

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

should suffice to add a .desktop entry in ~/.config/autostart/
something like polkit.desktop with contents like these:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Polkit Agent
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=eval "$(/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1)"

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#9 2022-01-14 18:16:21

Head_on_a_Stick
Member
From: London
Registered: 2019-03-24
Posts: 3,125  
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Broken pkexec in Chimaera

EDX-0 wrote:
Exec=eval "$(/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1)"

Why the eval? The agent is directly executable.

A simpler approach is to just add this line to ~/.xsessionrc:

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

Reference: https://wiki.debian.org/Xsession


Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

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