Beginner's Guide to Policykit?

[eccerr0r]

This has been annoying me for ages.

Is there some readable documentation out there on how policykit works, how to fix permissions issues, etc.? I find that I end up running into policykit issues a lot and not sure how to fix. Sometimes the settings look right in the permissions editor but doesn't actually work.

The two issues I see now are on different machines - It seems to hide the suspend/shutdown/reboot options?

The other machine, I can't suspend, it seems like though the suspend option is shown, using verbose gnome-power-manager it says I don't have permission to suspend the machine...

Not sure why policykit/consolekit is the most frustrating thing in Gnome...

[lxg]

The two issues I see now are on different machines - It seems to hide the suspend/shutdown/reboot options?

I just had the same issue. Adding consolekit to the default runlevel solved it for me. (Thanks to peratu at #gentoo.)

[eccerr0r]

I've heard of consolekit/dbus not starting issues before, so unfortunately it wasn't the issue. The other silly thing is that some users are able to, and some aren't... which adds another layer of complexity...

Very strange...

My suspend issue is even worse - I had suspend working on an external HDD when I installed Gentoo initially to that disk. When I transferred that install to my internal SSD, it started failing. I used a tar copy of the whole disk -- most things worked just fine, but now suspend no longer works with apparently a permission problem.

[Ant P.]

I had the same "missing suspend" thing with xfce-power-manager; eventually I found a workaround, running "upower --dump && udisks --dump" manually before starting X.

This *Kit bloat seems to create more problems than it solves...

[rsala]

I'm having a problem with inconsistent access to my cd player in gnome documented in this thread
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-8 ... ght-.html
It is starting to look like a policykit issue as well. I added consolekit to my default runlevel but it hasn't fixed my problem.

[penetrode]

This *Kit bloat seems to create more problems than it solves...

Hear hear!

[rsala]

I agree! My problem is very flacky and I don't even know how to go about solving it. Things should either "just work" or there should be a howto that shows you how to configure and debug your machine.