cannot use gparted

Support
1

An even better test case is GParted.

In your Whonix 15 do: sudo apt install gparted then try to launch ‘GParted’ from the start menu. Works in W14. Fails in my Whonix 15.

This is a bad bug. It’s not the ‘big’ upstream bug I thought it was in my OP.

As per this link, changing GParted’s .policy file allow_active string to yes does fix GParted.

Similarly, I can incorporate that to fix my broken gdebi-gtk in my W15 by doing this one-liner:

sudo rm /usr/bin/gdebi-gtk && echo -e '#!/bin/bash\npkexec /usr/share/gdebi/gdebi-gtk "$@"' | sudo tee /usr/bin/gdebi-gtk && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/gdebi-gtk && sudo sed -i 's#/usr/bin/gdebi-gtk#/usr/share/gdebi/gdebi-gtk#g' /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/com.ubuntu.pkexec.gdebi-gtk.policy

But I’m guessing this is terrible security, and not a proper fix at all. So what should we do to fix this basic pkexec issue in Whonix? What’s the cause of the problem?

2

Why not start gparted from the CLI. Works for me.

3

With all respect - and I have a huge amount of that - we need to keep Whonix accessible to folks who will be alienated if they can only launch programs from Terminal all the time. Hell, what’s the point of even having Whisker Menu if we can’t launch programs like GParted from it? That is brokenness, this needs to be fixed.

Besides, GParted is only one example of whatever this Whonix 15 Buster XFCE problem is. It’s some weird policykit issue, and it will affect many programs in Debian.

@Patrick I don’t know why you’ve split this up into different topics - the symptom is the same problem, I’ve only giving different examples.

4

Indeed same cause as cannot use pkexec - #3 by AnonymousUser.