# some questions about policykit

## Adel Ahmed

I've been having problems mounting partitions, changing brightness...etc

I was taking a look at the polkit actions under /usr/share/polkit-1/actions, trying to fix these problems

the strange thing was changing the actions next to the allow_active had no effect!!!

changing allow_inactive fixed everything, which is very strange considering I am the active user If I understand that concept correctly, the active user is the user currently logged in to the tty of the system(not some remote session)

localhost actions # who

adel     tty1         2014-12-18 11:28

adel     pts/0        2014-12-18 11:28 (:0.0)

adel     pts/1        2014-12-18 11:28 (:0.0)

adel     pts/2        2014-12-18 11:35 (:0.0)

I'm  using no login manager, automatic login from getty and xfce4 using the .xinitrc file:

exec startxfce4 --with-ck-launch

am I doing something wrong? have I misunderstood something?

I'm not after a fix, everything is working fine, I want to understand how things are working currently

thanks

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## ppurka

I don't think you are the only one. The *kits have some of the most convoluted documentations/implementation and there is no way for a user to decipher how they truly behave from their documentations.

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## Adel Ahmed

I'll work on understanding polkit, It's just not on top of my priority list

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## depontius

I recently started removing it.  The system I'm using is *kit free, my wife's still has them - for now.

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## Adel Ahmed

I was using a polkit free environment, till password prompts started annoying me, I do plan to go ahead without them not at the moment though

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