Dear Robert.
* Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> [2014-01-22 21:11]:
Ran zypper up earlier this week on my daughters machine (13.1 x86_64) and now when she connects here phone a dialog appears
how is it connected, via USB cable, does it appear as a mass storage device?
requesting the root password.
The message, although this is probably not very useful info ;)
"An Application is attempting to perform an action that requires privileges. Authentication as the super user is required."
That is the policykit agent, in the normal case (i.e. default policykit privileges and everyting working as intended) a local user whose session is considered active by systemd-logind should be authorized to mount any removable storage.
Marcus already wrote some instructions for you to check against policykit whether you are authorized to mount filesystems.
In order to determine whether the current session is marked active, find the session number of the current user session with:
loginctl -al list-sessions
and then check with:
loginctl show-session <number> | grep ^Active
whether it is active.
Prior to zypper up this did not happen. I did not keep a log of the packages that were updated.
But zypper did, have a look at /var/log/zypp/history. Note that upgrade actions are referred to as |install|. Would be interesting if there are any suspicious updates (udisks2, udev, systemd, policykit) which might have triggered that.
I checked the settings for removable media and everything looks OK to me. This is probably not XFCE specific, but this is one of our more helpful and friendly lists.
Yes, this is something lower in the stack, policykit privileges or your session not being marked as active
I also installed kdenlive, lombar, and some other video editor recently, but I have a hard time connecting these apps to this event. My first guess would be some ill advised change in policy kit, but I have not seen other people complain.
Yep, I'm not seeing anything like that, at least with flash drives and SD cards.
Just an side note: On the systems where I am facing this issue, the useraccount is not the one that has been created during installation. This initial user never had such problems, only an additionally created one. The additional user is member of the same groups of course. Is this also the case on your setup? Greets Marcus PS: flipping the userids did not help here either.