Ubuntu

Gnome won't allow changes in System

Asked by DarthBiber

After the upgrade to Hardy, my Laptop won't allow me to change anything in the System pop out any more. I can access the program and look at the settings, but the button allowing me to change anything is grey and unclickable.
I am also unable to mount any removable disks (USB stick, SD card through internal reader) as a normal user. If I mount it manually, nautilus won't grand me access to the drive, unless I execute it as root (now, it would also mount automatically).
A third, I suspect related point is the sheer slowness of my programs executed as root (both with sudo and gksudo). It takes several minuets to load (I have a Dell 6400, 1.83GHz dual core, 2GB ram; the system monitor shows minimal use of resources) and whenever I try to change something (right click menu, open folder), the display freezes for another few minuets.

I suspect the communication to PolicyKit to be responsible, but can't be sure. I did look around here a bit, but since the error occurs, I can't change any settings here anymore either.

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Tiede (marcarthur) said : 		#1

I don't know if this might help you out, but after upgrading to hardy, I found out that my /etc/hosts file was borked.
I noticed that because if I try to sudo anything in the terminal, it would complain about not finding the hostname. This caused quite a few weird behaviors on my laptop, that all went away after I fixed my /etc/hosts file... You could try to do the same. (i.e, make sure the lines make sense/correspond to your computer name and username.

However, it may also be that you were accidentally kicked out of the admin group. sudo into users-admin and check that you are part of the admin group -do same for plugdev if you wish to...
Hopefully this should sort out your problem.

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DarthBiber (darthbiber) said : 		#2

Mhm, Yeah, I know I had the /etc/hosts problem, too, but I found it on here. This allowed me at least some access to the terminal (for some reason, apt-get won't work, everything else seems to be fine to me).
The groups are correct: "martin root adm dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev lpadmin scanner admin polkituser"
Polikituser was a attempt to fix the problem I found on a different side...

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Murali Krishna Marimekala (murali-marimekala) said : 		#3

Hi DarthBiber,

Try clean uinstalling Compiz fusion and emarald if they are installed by upgrading your pc.

I faced similar problem and above solution worked fine for me.

--Murali

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DarthBiber (darthbiber) said : 		#4

no effect...
Thanks anyways...

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DarthBiber (darthbiber) said : 		#5

Ok, I got it.
The Problem was a change in the PolicyKit.conf I forgot about. Ironically, PolicyKit, which caused my problem in the first place, is fine again now, too. I just went back to the default PolicyKit.conf ...