Fun with suspending, systemd, and sessions

[MrCyborgBear]

I'm on Arrogance right now, and everything is going fairly smoothly, other than the grayed out suspend/hibernate buttons in the logout screen and the xfce power manager.

Naively, I set out to fix this tonight, and I've just gotten stuck. Here's what I've done so far, all for the goal of being able to run systemctl suspend without needing sudo and possibly getting those buttons working:

1) Disabled consolekit per this thread: http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f ... consolekit after reading this page on the Arch wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ConsoleKit (also removed ck-session-launch from xinitrc)
At this point, the buttons are still grayed out

2) I run the loginctl at the bottom of the wiki page, and discover my user is not active. I did fix this by changing the contents of /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to the fix in this bug report, https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/32206

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#!/bin/bash

if [[ -z $XDG_VTNR ]]; then
exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"
else
exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@" vt$XDG_VTNR
fi

And, what do you know, my user is active after a reboot! I celebrated my small victory, the buttons are still grayed out at this point though, but i figured at least i could suspend without needing sudo. But I was wrong.
Unfortunately, i get this message after running "systemctl suspend"

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ian@gillian:~$ systemctl suspend
Failed to issue method call: Access denied
Failed to issue method call: Access denied

So after checking around, I haven't found any solution to this. It isn't a big deal, i can always just create a rule in the sudoers file to get around having to enter my password, but I really want to know why this isn't working.

On that wiki page, it said starting with polkit .107-4, systemd-logind would be required instead of consolekit, but the version in the debian repos is only .105-4. Does it still need consolekit for some reason? Is there something else I'm missing? Also, if anyone had a fix for the buttons, it would be much appreciated :)

[wuxmedia]

Well you have been having fun.
If you want to suspend by CLI, install;
pm-tools or pm-utils (can't remember)
if you want your icons and suspend on lid down, install a display manager.

[machinebacon]

This sounds quite good so far, congratulations. About the systemctl without root permissions, take a look at visudo (sudo visudo) and you find that I have already added the /sbin/reboot and /sbin/poweroff commands to NOPASSWD. You might add the /sbin/sysctl there, if not already existing.

I am not quite sure what exactly is needed to get this to run, but polkit can be manipulated with the files in
/usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.policy
/usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.qos.policy


Check there if you find these lines: <allow_active>yes</allow_active>


Save and reboot, and upower should then handle the suspend/hibernation (which is always a bit of a PITA in Linux). Of course, for hibernation, make sure you have sufficient swap space (I would suggest around 2, better 4GB)

[DebianJoe]

If you have a legitimate single-user session (and nobody else is logged in via another tty) validated through polkit, I thought that systemctl allowed non-root use of suspend.

Interesting.

[MrCyborgBear]

@wuxmedia: I'm definitely going with pm-utils if I can't get my session working properly. Also, I'd use a display manager, but that would be too easy :)

@machinebacon: The allow_active lines are set to yes, so I don't understand why I can't suspend, even though my session is listed as active

@DebianJoe:

here is the output from loginctl list-sessions:

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ian@gillian:~$ loginctl list-sessions
   SESSION        UID USER             SEAT            
        c1       1000 ian              seat0           

1 sessions listed.

and then here's the result from loginctl:

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ian@gillian:~$ loginctl show-session c1 
Id=c1
Timestamp=Sat 2013-11-30 07:37:14 EST
TimestampMonotonic=51252279
DefaultControlGroup=systemd:/user/1000.user/c1.session
VTNr=1
TTY=/dev/tty1
Remote=no
Service=login
Leader=1167
Audit=0
Type=tty
Class=user
Active=yes
State=active
KillProcesses=no
IdleHint=yes
IdleSinceHint=1385815032340482
IdleSinceHintMonotonic=49313085
Name=ian

So as far as I can tell, I'm the only user logged in, and my state is active, but polkit isn't accepting that for some reason and wont allow me to use systemctl suspend/poweroff/reboot/hibernate/etc. Also, policykit-1 does depend on consolekit, so maybe i still need that for some reason (the package isn't removed, it just isn't loaded)? I guess I'll install arrogance in a VM and try and get suspend working with consolekit, and if that works I'll use consolekit for now.

[wuxmedia]

RE: DM's - yeah, I went with easy 8)
kudos for doing it another way!

[DebianJoe]

Hmmm, I've got the same issue with BBQTiny if I attempt systemctl-suspend as a user which is something I've not attempted previously. It does work with ck-session being activated, although it still prompts for user password, which IMHO is bloat since I don't use graphical buttons..and if I'm going to enter a password, it might as well be root's. If you are using a single-user system, I think that the visudo hack is still the best route for efficiency's sake.

I'm interested in how this works out, more from an observational standpoint than anything. Perhaps the transition to systemd isn't flawless in Debian yet, as hard as that might be to believe.... ;)

[machinebacon]

Yes, [it] is especially ridiculous if we consider the fact that a 'suspend at close lid' works, and it would even work if a guest in my apartment would close the lid for fun.

[MrCyborgBear]

Alright, I found this interesting bug report from someone running fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1012650

They've fixed it on their end, and I haven't found a similar bug anywhere from debian, so it might be the fault of systemd and consolekit. It's beyond me to fix, and I don't really want to put any more time into it for now, considering I can suspend through the console. Oh well, I gave it a good run. Should I mark this as resolved or something else?

[wuxmedia]

[Pending] ??

as you wish, cool with me to leave it open.