XFCE Update Applet authentication problem

Using XFCE with OpenSUSE 11.3. XFCE’s Update Applet runs without superuser privileges. It finds updates without problems, but when I try to install them, it reports that it failed to authenticate or something like that. I have to start YaST Online Update module in order to install the updates. Is it possible to enable XFCE Update Applet to prompt for superuser authentication or to directly use YaST Online Update as panel applet, like in KDE?

Hi,

same over here. It drives me nuts! Seems that you have to configure the packagekit stuff. But no documentation can be found that tells you how to enable plain users in XFCE or whatever desktop to apply patches.

If someone found out in meantime, please let us know…

Regards, Torsten

After having some frustrating experiences, I now found how to enable users. I created a description about it:

Policy Kit Configuration

In openSUSE the following configuration files maps actions on a system to security policies:

/etc/polkit-default-privs.local
/etc/polkit-default-privs.restrictive
/etc/polkit-default-privs.standard

An example is the action to apply updates as user with the package kit updater applet

…]
org.freedesktop.packagekit.system-update auth_admin_keep_always
…]

The webpage PolicyKit configuration describes what defaults are defined within Policy Kit:

* no
* auth_self_one_shot
* auth_self
* auth_self_keep_session
* auth_self_keep_always
* auth_admin_one_shot
* auth_admin
* auth_admin_keep_session
* auth_admin_keep_always
* yes

The meaning of this definitions, are partially described within the manpage of polkit(8). To stick with our update example, you can define “yes” as policy to the

org.freedesktop.packagekit.system-update

action, and every user is able to apply patches to the system.

After you changed mappings in polkit-default-privs.* you have to run the command set_polkit_default_privs as administrator root.

HTH, Torsten