While packaging Xfce 4.7 I had to find a way to allow the desktop user to shutdown/reboot(consolekit), hibernate/suspend(upower),mounte removable devices(udisks). Recent display managers (gdm, kdm and lxdm) can handle their own polkit/consolekit session through pam access. The gnome/xfce4-session packages only have basic access to consolekit and since the consolekit 0.4.2 in testing they can't deal with it anymore. As a workaround I have plans to ship files in xfce4-session as proto files where the admin can add users or groups to allow certain actions: /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.freedesktop.upower.pkla and /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.freedesktop.consolekit.pkla and maybe one for udisk something like https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=42669 . This could also be done each in the consolekit/upower/udisks packages. But all this is crap working around some nasty bugs in our pam pkg not allowing direct access to consolekit. Please have a look at https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17188 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/21391 Pam has an update pending (also fixing security related issues) and quiet a lot open bugs: https://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?string=pam&project=1&search_name=&type[]=&sev[]=&pri[]=&due[]=&reported[]=&cat[]=&status[]=open&percent[]=&opened=&dev=&closed=&duedatefrom=&duedateto=&changedfrom=&changedto=&openedfrom=&openedto=&closedfrom=&closedto=&do=index So please someone with time and knowledge may have look (Tobias P. doesn't seem to have the time for this). If we can't menage to fix this until the Xfce release I'd like to know what you think could be a good and safe workaround (recommending power/storage groups?). Note: Gentoo seems also running into this pam/consolekit issue. Not sure about Ubuntu and Fedora(that does heavy pam configurations). -Andy