[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#703016: policykit-1-gnome: polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 fails to start

[Kevin Locke]

Package: policykit-1-gnome
Version: 0.105-2
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

On a freshly-installed system running XFCE with LightDM, PolicyKit
authentication prompts are not presented for actions which require
authentication.  For example, attempting to mount an internal drive
(which is configured auth_admin_keep) results in "Failed to mount X:
Authentication is required" without prompting for authentication.

The cause appears to be that polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 is not
running.  If I launch polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 from an xterm,
it runs without error and authentication dialogs are presented.

I can confirm that 
/etc/xdg/autostart/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop is intact
and unchanged and that there is no entry in ~/.config/autostart/ which
would override it.

~/.xsession-errors includes the following messages:

** (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:3382): WARNING **: Unable to register authentication agent: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Cannot determine user of subject
Cannot register authentication agent: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Cannot determine user of subject

Possibly a race condition?

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help track this down
further.

Cheers,
Kevin


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (101, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.8.2-kevinoid1 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages policykit-1-gnome depends on:
ii  libc6                  2.13-38
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0     2.26.1-1
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.33.12+really2.32.4-5
ii  libgtk-3-0             3.4.2-6
ii  libpolkit-agent-1-0    0.105-3
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-3
ii  policykit-1            0.105-3

policykit-1-gnome recommends no packages.

policykit-1-gnome suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information