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So on 14.04 LTS I was playing around with some settings to solve another problem, and somehow managed to screw things up and now Ubuntu no longer asks for root privileges before trying to perform administrative actions. The catch is that my user does NOT have them by default, which means those actions ALL fail.

I can still run "sudo " from terminal and it'll ask for my password and work fine, but any GUI that requires root just fails without asking anything.

Any ideas what I did wrong and how to solve it? Thanks in advance.

Elad Avron
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  • I don't know how to fix this (I am interested in the answer) but in the short term, as a workaround, run your GUI from the command line using 'gksudo '. If gksudo is not installed, you can install it with 'sudo apt-get install gksu'. Does that work ? – hatterman Aug 12 '14 at 12:03
  • It does, and I considered using this method exclusively for a while, but the problem is that I don't know the command-names for most applications I need to run, and it's becoming a hassle to google them. Anyway, I think this whole mess started because I used sudo instead of gksudo to run xserver, but I'm only presuming. – Elad Avron Aug 12 '14 at 12:19
  • Why not uninstall and reinstall the xserver ? (Or is it too vital that you don't screw things up totally ?) – hatterman Aug 12 '14 at 12:24
  • I already tried a reinstall, but not a full remove+reinstall. I'll give it a shot, thanks itmt. – Elad Avron Aug 12 '14 at 12:25
  • I did a full uninstall/reinstall to solve other problems and it all went fine. Good luck ! – hatterman Aug 12 '14 at 12:27
  • Nope, I'm afraid it didn't solve it :-( – Elad Avron Aug 12 '14 at 12:33
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    I will bow out gracefully on this then, I am a little out of my depth now. I will be interested if an answer does appear. – hatterman Aug 13 '14 at 11:36
  • I ended up having to reinstall the entire system, and for some other unknown reason after a regular reinstall all the drivers were dead so I had to reinstall again this time formatting and starting with a clean slate. – Elad Avron Aug 13 '14 at 18:33

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I had the same problem after changing to ubuntu-desktop from lubuntu on my imac. It seems, that 'policykit-1-gnome' was missing. After reinstalling sudo apt-get install policykit-1-gnome and logout-login it works flawlessly.

szabadkai
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