[SOLVED] Polkit/Mate: make it ask permission to mount drive?

djhyland · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2008 Posts: 67 Location: St. Paul MN

Hi all!

First off, apologies if this isn't the right forum to ask, or if I've misdiagnosed the problem I'm having. That said...

A while back, I noticed that my computer changed its behavior when I try to mount a partition through Mate. In the past, when I've clicked on any of my partitions listed in the "Places" menu, it's asked for an administrative password and, once one is given, mounted the drive to /media/$DRIVENAME as expected. Somewhere along the line, though, I started getting error messages when I'd try the same: "Error, Unable to mount $DRIVENAME, Not authorized to perform operation". After some searching, I can get it to mount the partition without any sort of permission by modifying /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.UDisks2.policy in such a way:

djhyland · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2008 Posts: 67 Location: St. Paul MN

Right. I figured it out on my own: I needed to install mate-polkit. After installing it, changing the "yes" options back to "auth_admin", and rebooting my computer, I'm now properly asked for my password when I try to mount an internal drive. Problem solved!

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2018 10:34 pm Post subject:

Interesting, I would have thought that would have been a dependency of mate.

Thank you for finding the problem, I wonder if this should be an actual ebuild issue, or was there a USE=polkit somewhere that should have been used to automatically pick up mate-polkit. Does not look like it however. Perhaps this should be a feature enhancement to save future hassle?

Perhaps if you want, submit a bug to add this as a feature enhancement on bugs.gentoo.org. That way if USE=polkit is set on mate-base/mate then mate-polkit will automatically be picked up. If someone forgets USE=polkit, well now it's self documented in the ebuild :D
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djhyland · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2008 Posts: 67 Location: St. Paul MN

I think that the problem was that I didn't have a USE=polkit flag set when I first encountered the problem. Once I realized that it was an issue with polkit, I tried removing all colsolekit/polkit dependencies from my system and recompiled my system with a USE=-polkit -policykit in my make.conf. Unfortunately, Mate seems to need consolekit which needs polkit, so I put a sys-auth/consolekit policykit line in my package.use file. I can see why emerge didn't automatically include mate-polkit as a dependency.

That said, it'd have been nice when Mate decided that it needed consolekit and polkit to work properly (during a version bump, I'm pretty sure) if it had added mate-polkit as a dependency.

All told, I'll write this one off as a consequence of my specific configuration rather than file a bug report.