2014-01-08 Some time ago, I've set up a system for someone else. I've chosen Xfce as window manager (desktop environment) but without a login manager (because I can't stand them). Two things didn't work then: The user was not able to mount flash disks and the user was not able to shut the machine down. The shutdown was no problem to bypass: Just a shell script and sudo(8). Good old Unix knowledge could solve the problem. For the device mounting, my Unix knowledge failed. The problem was part of a domain that is separate from the Unix system itself, sadly. The guys at debianforum.de provided a solution. [0] [1] I don't know exactly what the problem was, but after modifying the polkit configuration and installing the package xfce4-goodies the user could mount the devices. Actually, I don't care for the problem source, because it's not part of real Unix, IMO. In Unix, there should be no subdomains, it should all be just one large Unix domain ... one system. It's sad to realize that you can use GNU/Linux in a unixy way or in a fat-graphical-blob-way, but a lot of things fail if you try to combine the two ways. This is sad because it is a fundamental break with the flexiblity Unix should provide. This is the reason why I should stop administrating systems for others -- too many interest conflicts. [0] http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=147080 [1] http://wiki.debianforum.de/Xfce http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke