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Kewl

Wiki Maintainer

From: UK

Registered: 2018-03-09

Posts: 22

pkexec randomly not displaying the graphical authentication agent

I have not been able to understand why sometimes pkexec is not displaying the graphical authentication agent. Nothing appears on screen, it is stuck waiting.
To me it seems quite random even if there must be a good reason that I would like to find out.
For test purpose I use:

pkexec echo 1

and it hangs. I reboot it works again, then the issue reappears another day. Note I have also experienced that it was not working right after reboot.

I use polkit-gnome, my DE is XFCE which is run in a VNC session on display :8.0.

polkit is active and the log

journalctl -b -t polkitd

says:

 Acquired the name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 on the system bus.
 Registered Authentication agent for unix-session:1 

As you can see, I am not familiar with polkit and would welcome any direction I should investigate. Also let me know if I forgot to mention some useful information.

Last edited by Kewl (2019-06-08 06:30:33)