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When I plug an SD card into the SD card reader (/dev/mmcblk0), a popup appears, saying:

Authentication is required to mount a device.

When I plug in a VGA cable between my laptop and an external monitor, I get:

Authentication is required to create a colour managed device.

When I close the lid, requesting the computer suspend, I get:

Authentication is required before suspending the system.

I've done everything suggested in the answers to:

And rebooted, but the same results persist.

The latter two popups don't actually prevent anything from happening -- the screen still works, and so does suspension, but I can't access the SD card until I authenticate.

If only because they're an annoyance, how can I make them go away?

My user is definitely in the sudo group, and I've edited the polkit XML files as suggested in the above questions.

Is there some way to make these stop?

the output of groups is:

cat adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare libvirtd
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cat
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  • @mchid I've edited my question -- should `admin` be in that list? – cat Mar 22 '16 at 20:26
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    admin group is used for support of older versions of Ubuntu. It's useless as of now – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Mar 22 '16 at 20:27
  • Yes that list looks fine. – mchid Mar 22 '16 at 20:28
  • Do `stat /dev/mmcblk0` see what that tells you – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Mar 22 '16 at 20:28
  • @Serg `Access: (0660/brw-rw----) Uid: ( 0/ root)` ? -- If I add an entry to `/etc/fstab` to change that, then Ubuntu will complain if there is nothing mountable on that port at boot, and make me hit a key, which I do not want. – cat Mar 22 '16 at 20:30
  • Does this help https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=102050 ? Although the thread is a bit old. – mchid Mar 22 '16 at 20:43
  • @mchid No, that doesn't help. – cat Mar 22 '16 at 21:06
  • If you use fstab add the user,noauto options, user allows regular users to mount, noauto prevents mountall from trying to mount it at boot. – MttJocy Apr 27 '16 at 02:54
  • @MttJocy Ooh, interesting. That's one bullet gone. – cat Apr 27 '16 at 02:55
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    Or just add yourself to the `disk` group. You might want the `dialout` and `audio` groups as well. I was actually going to mark this question as a duplicate of another, about how to make policykit not prompt you for passwords, but am unable to do so, due to the bounty. – dobey Apr 27 '16 at 20:49
  • @dobey Adding yourself to the `disk` group is a bad idea, as well as not actually fixing the root problem. – Hitechcomputergeek Apr 27 '16 at 21:28
  • @dobey I've tried editing all the Polkit files, and it hasn't helped, which I also mentioned in my question. – cat Apr 27 '16 at 21:32
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    Have you tried adding the polkit configs to `/etc/polkit-1/rules.d/` as described [here](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Polkit#For_specific_actions)? – daltonfury42 Apr 27 '16 at 21:52
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    if you put yourself in the `root` group it'll probably stop asking... but that is bad practice as you'll basically be running every app with full perms – wagyourtail Nov 16 '16 at 03:56
  • @wagyourtail That seems like a bad idea. This no longer affects me (I reinstalled) but I won't VTC since maybe it will happen to others and get answers – cat Nov 16 '16 at 04:01

1 Answers1

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  1. If you can get a Live CD / Live USB for the version of Ubuntu you're running, boot to it and select the "Refresh system files" option. This may reset some other changes you have made to system files.

  2. For me, the problem went away when I do-release-upgraded that system from 15.10 to 16.04 -- probably because the polkit infrastructure changed and so did the configuration causing the issues.

Unfortunately, I don't know of another way to fix this without Live Media or waiting for a version change.

cat
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