How to fix "org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1" error when unmounting USBs in Thunar?

Question

I recently installed Debian Wheezy with XFce4. Whenever I try to unmount a USB, I get this error message:

GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

This might be part of the same family of issues that cause one not to be able to mount USB drives and other kinds of external media in Debian (and other distros) without administration privileges when PolicyKit is involved.

Though I don't have the complete information at hand, I seem to remember the culprit is the default permissions for udisks (which XFCE uses to handle automounting).

You can partially (or perhaps fully) solve this by

• making sure you have all PolicyKit relevant packages installed, as well as the CK connector.

• Adding a file called udisks.pkla to the /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/ directory with the following contents:

  [udisks]
  Identity=unix-user:*
  Action=org.freedesktop.udisks*
  ResultAny=yes
  

(Might merit a X restart or full system reboot)

I got this from somewhere in the Arch forums. Credits go to them.

EDIT - similar issues have been posted here, with similar solutions: How to mount USB stick on Debian Sid?