synaptic can't launch from menu - solved
 

says something about pkexec? anyone know how to fix this. just nottied - i believe that all 3 laptops in the house have the same issue

will check office laptop in a minute.

the ofice one has the same probem moksha cannot launch it. hmmmm..

ylee tried sudo apt-get install policykit-1-gnome from another thread you said to install and choose olicy kit at startup but still nothing.

ok on reboot seemed to work now - weird.

all 3 seem to work now. thannks ylee

adding policykit to startup really slows the startup time badly.... too bad.

i didn't notice any slowdown on mine after adding policykit to startup. did it affect all of your systems that way?

2 out of 3 - the 3rd is ssd and more ram

one of these days i will move into the new era of magic that is ssd. there was a decent price on a 250 gb samsung in sunday's paper (and probably plenty online) and it certainly made me thing "what if...". goodness knows i use well less than that amount of space for my daily setup, but as i am not anywhere near an intensive user the hdd still spins plenty fast for me :)

ylee - what does this policy kit stuff do and shy needed? to ask a really dumb question and why would it slow startup times so much? thank you.

I did some more testing and this is what I found:

I did a clean install of Bodhi. Next I installed synaptic. It launched fine from the menu. I looked to see if policykit-1-gnome was installed and it was not. So I don't think that was my particular problem because everything is working fine. I also checked to see if polkit-agent-helper-1 was installed and running and it was.

I then installed the following: gnome-disk-utility, gnome-multi-writer and libreoffice. Installing one of those packages broke either pkexec or esudo because now synaptic won't launch from the menu. I looked to see if either of the policy kits were installed or running. Everything was as before. I tried esudo, e.g. esudo pcmanfm and that worked fine. Again I reinstalled esudo anyway and everything works again. This solution was offered earlier by rbtylee another synaptic thread and for me it works and it was pretty painless. Thanks again.

I don't experience and any noticeable slowdown on any of my systems even my netbook using it. Sorry.

If I were sitting in front of your systems and saw the slow down I would debug it somehow. But I am not. I would start by looking in your .xsessionerrors file for clues and go from there. If no clues there I would look at sys logs. And if none of that helped I would break out the serious tools, xephyr strace gdb and so on. But I would figure it out in time.

As to why it is needed, it is only needed if you install programs that try to get root access by using policykit and/or pkexec. And do so in a way that doesn't play well with the way esudo is code and packaged. It is all rather complicated, google it. Policykit is a sort of new development to me who is old enough to consider guns N roses a new band. So I only know the basics of using it.

Thanks ylee. nothing changed other than the commands i ran as you instructed so i thought that may be the culprit.

you skillset is beyond me - i appreciate t but will have to leave as it unless something more pops up.

thanks my friend!

i had been reading another thread that gave me some info on solving this however - no knowing command line and also so little of linux. will this problem be solved when i do updates and upgrades? or will every other or some other updates and dist-upgrades break this again? what do i have to do to permanently fix it if this will break again. thank yoy.

Updates will not break it if ya they don't include esudo. Put esudo on hold if ya wish and ya should be ok. I may get around to trying to find a fix for esudo so that it plays well with policy kit but prob that will have to wait until the next release. That is because various methods of doing it more properly should have been done when the ISO was made. BUT that is not to say I might try some hackish sorta works solution before then.

Hate to say it but it is not really an issue that bothers me much and I tend to focus my attention of stuff that I think needs done or that personally borks my system. It is mostly a time issue and our team has shrunk to next to nothing, and besides it never had many programmers in it. On occasion an e-dev or two would help and a few semi programmers helped some in the past. Plus we lost one or two real programmers and ... Not worth going over the inner details of our history here lol.

sorry to add to your work but if i update and dist-upgrade via terminal - how do i not include esudo as you say.

i always do sudo apt-get update - and it just runs and then sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. and it just runs - i do not see where i have any choice as such. sorry i keep telling you guys i know squat and am rather dense.

thanks robert.