System policy denies access to various things

English Applications
1

Hi everybody, I’m new here so please treat me kindly! :wink:

I installed and ran the “World of Goo” demo. The graphics worked nicely but there was no sound, and after I quit the game the desktop resolution was skewed somehow even though the display properties indicated that the resolution was still the same. After I rebooted the resolution was fine but the sound and network manager don’t work at all. I can’t see the network manager applet in the system tray, and the volume application has just a red cross over it in the tray. The sound configuration manager says that I don’t have the rights to access gstreamer. Also when I mount USB memory devices it says that the system policy prevents me from mounting them and asks for an administrator password (when I give the password, the device mounts normally). If I log out and try to log in again, I can’t see my name in the options (I am the single user on the computer and there used to be my username). When I press ‘Other’ user I can log in with my username or as the root. My username belongs to the groups users, dialout and video, as I recall belonging to before this happened…

I have and Intel chip motherboard (ICHR9 or something in that direction), 4GB of DDR2 memory, Radeon HD4870 graphics card and the sound is integrated on the motherboard. I use a wireless USB stick for the internet. The system version is 11.1 64-bit, but it is not updated properly because my download quota is very limited at the moment ;). I had some problems with the automatic detection of sound before my current problems, and I used the OSS drivers for sound. I use the ATI’s restricted drivers from their repository.

Any help is appreciated. I would really love to get World of Goo working since it is such an awesome game! =)

2

Not sure about this, but could be a PolicyKit issue. Have a look through this documentation:

Novell Documentation

3

Additionally, I cannot shut down or restart the system from the shutdown menu but I have to do it by using /sbin/shutdown with root priviledges…

It does seem to have something to do with the PolicyKit. I tried restoring default priviledges, giving myself special privileges for sound, networking and shutting down the system, and ignoring the whole policy checks by editing the configuration files, but nothing works. Quite irritating because I wouldn’t want to reinstall system!

4

How odd. Having a look at the PolicyKit documentation (via link I gave previously), it mentions:

9.3.4 Restoring the Default Privileges

Each application supporting PolicyKit comes with a default set of implicit policies defined by the application’s developers, the so-called “upstream defaults”. The privileges defined by the upstream defaults are not necessarily the ones that are activated by default on openSUSE. openSUSE comes with a predefined set of privileges (see Modifying Configuration Files for Implicit Privileges for more information) that is activated by default, overriding the upstream defaults.

Since the Authorization tool and the PolicyKit command line utilities always operate on the upstream defaults, openSUSE comes with the command-line tool set_polkit_default_privs that resets privileges to the values defined in /etc/polkit-default-privs.*. However, set_polkit_default_privs will only reset policies that are set to the upstream defaults. To reset all policies to the upstream defaults first and then apply the openSUSE defaults, run the following command:

rm -f /var/lib/PolicyKit-public/* && set_polkit_defaut_privs

  1. So try the above command sequence (as root of course), and see if that restores the required user privileges.

  2. I guess this might work too:

zypper in --force hal

5

Have You by any chance been playing with setting file permissions? Did you by any chance set them to paranoid??

PolicyKit does not restrict shutdown behaviour by default.

6

deano: I tried option 1) but nothing happened. Can give a try at 2) once I get home.

Bender: I have changed file permissions on my home directory (recursively) so that only the user has rw permissions, but it was a while before the current issue. Other than that I cannot recall doing anything.

7

Maybe worth creating a new user, and see whether the access problems still exist for that user.

8

On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:16:01 GMT, lazer fin
<lazer_fin@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
>deano: I tried option 1) but nothing happened. Can give a try at 2) once
>I get home.
>
>Bender: I have changed file permissions on my home directory
>(recursively) so that only the user has rw permissions, but it was a
>while before the current issue. Other than that I cannot recall doing
>anything.

Each user needs to have execute on his own directories. It is a
peculiarity of *nix file systems. Not having that creates all kinds
of odd seeming problems.

9

Naturally I have execution rights for all the directories.

I tried reinstalling hal and the policykit, and creating a new user. No luck. According to the documentation of World of Goo the game has some problems when the desktop effects are turned on. Could try posting on their help forum.