Arch Linux

rene

Member

Registered: 2010-08-18

Posts: 36

SLiM and ConsoleKit: enable CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL in your kernel!

Good day.

This forum has seen a number of threads concerning SLiM and ConsoleKit problems over the last few days, many of them involving yours truly suggesting replacing SLiM with a different display manager such as LXDM.

Now, slim IS in fact an abandoned piece of software (both upstream and currently also with respect to archlinux specifically) and as such, replacing it with something else is still an eminently sensible thing to do -- but I've just happened upon what seems to be the core of the problem for those of us who were in fact having these ConsoleKit problems. SLiM relies on the pam_ck_connector.so module for its interaction with ConsoleKit and since consolekit-0.4.2 really needs CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL enabled in the kernel. That option enables /proc/$PID/sessionid and it's that ID which the module uses to determine if a session is local. Without the /proc file present, you would see two sessions in the output of ck-list-sessions (run from a terminal in X) neither of which had both active=TRUE and is-local=TRUE, but with it present, the session with x11-display-device='/dev/tty7 will in fact have active=TRUE and is-local=TRUE.

Until very recently, this problem was hidden from view for many of us by local polkit files installed by xfce4-session and thunar and only surfaced when the current versions of these packages deleted those local tweaks, relying on a correct ConsoleKit setup to keep things working. Symptoms of it not working anymore ranged from all of a sudden being unable to reboot and shutdown from the XFCE logout dialog, Thunar having assorted mounting problems, Brasero failing to eject after a burn and so on. I just checked, and the arch default kernel does have CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL enabled which means that the problem should, largely, be considered to have been just a user problem. Now, frankly, with this stuff as poorly documented as it is, I won't hold it against me, but still...

If you're like me, you probably won't actually enjoy LXDM much and now that I know what the problem is, I'll probably go back to SLiM for the time being. Do note the bit about SLIM being a dead project though, and decide for yourself.

Google-TAGS: arch linux, slim, reboot, shutdown, thunar, not authorized, brasero, cannot eject, consolekit, polkit

Last edited by rene (2011-11-12 05:27:14)

Parmazae

Member

From: Kentucky, USA

Registered: 2011-10-10

Posts: 30

Re: SLiM and ConsoleKit: enable CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL in your kernel!

Thanks for the information!

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Thanks,
Parmazae

archlinux x86_64