Adjusting screen brightness in GNOME 3.12 causes endless password prompt loop

[bjornfor]

While testing gnome 3.12 I tried the screen brightness widget up in the upper right corner. Immediately after moving the slider I got prompted for password (pkexec popup or something). But it would not accept my password and just kept popping up. This popup actually "hogs the whole screen" (it grays out other elements and alt-tab stops working), so I ended up restarting my machine and went back to gnome 3.10. In gnome 3.10 there is no password prompt when changing screen brightness.

[bjornfor]

Clicking "cancel" didn't stop the popup from popping up either...

[wmertens]

next time you might be able to avoid a reboot by pressing ctrl-alt-1,
logging in, and finding the process that generated the popup and killing
it...

On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Bjørn Forsman [email protected]
wrote:

Clicking "cancel" didn't stop the popup from popping up either...

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[lucabrunox]

What happens if you launch /nix/store/*gnome-settings*3.12*/libexec/gsd-backlight-helper --set-brightness 7 ?

[lucabrunox]

Should be something related to share/polkit-1/actions/org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power.policy in the gnome-settings-daemon out path.

[bjornfor]

@lethalman: Issue solved!

Turns out that this only happens in the time between "nixos-rebuild switch" (from 3.10 to 2.12) and until a reboot (or possibly a re-login). So not really a "gnome 3.12" bug, but more of a "nixos-switch sometimes has some unfortunate side-effects" bug. After I rebooted, I could move the screen brightness slider with no password prompt.

Also, it was not really an "endless loop". When moving the slider the system generates lots of events, and for each event GNOME runs "pkexec ..." askin for password (blocking). All I had to do was press escape 20+ times to get back to my desktop. :-)

And it works without adding gnome3_12.gnome_settings_daemon to environment.systemPackages.

[lucabrunox]

@bjornfor I see, that's because nixos-rebuild does not restart all services I guess. Maybe upower is not restarted (because gnome 3.12 needs a major version bump) or such.
Thanks for testing!