I am running Arch with KDE and everything is up-to-date.

Every now and then, my system clock gets stuck in UTC when I am GMT-4. I have installed ntp and have it running via rc.conf, but when I go to adjust the time and say "Set date and time automatically", I get the error "Unable to authenticate/execute the action: 3". I also get the same error when trying to change the login theme. I do have dbus installed and running (I heard that might cause this).

Does anyone know what might be wrong? The login screen is more of an annoyance but having the wrong time is more a problem.

Is your session listed as "Active" in the output of "ck-list-sessions"?

It is listed as active:

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Session1:
        unix-user = '1000'
        realname = 'Matt'
        seat = 'Seat1'
        session-type = ''
        active = TRUE
        x11-display = ':0'
        x11-display-device = '/dev/tty7'
        display-device = ''
        remote-host-name = ''
        is-local = TRUE
        on-since = '2012-08-10T23:15:48.558273Z'
        login-session-id = ''


I've been playing around and I think it might be that Polkit might not be set up correctly. When I go to System Settings -> Action Policy, everything is blank.

To globally set the timezone (in archlinux) alter the "TIMEZONE" variable in /etc/rc.conf - you can use eg. tzselect to figure the proper string.

To do that _locally_ (ie. for the user/session) "export TZ=GMT-4" in a shellscript in ~/.kde/env

To temporarily alter the timezone as seen by kde (ktimezoned kded, I presume?) symlink /etc/localtime to the proper timezone file, eg.
sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime
you need root permissions to do that

I guess it would be helpfull if ktimezoned (i assume this monitors and propagates timezone changes to applications?) could take a user setting (eg. through dbus or whatever), propagate that to clients now and also ensure to write it into TZ for the next session start since that global timezone mangeling is actually sh** (should be done per user and NOT require root permissions at all) and because of how the system works, will usually not survive the next reboot (when the inittab scripts just fix that by their opinion) - just getting it into ~/.profile seems a good idea to me too (but i didn't test whether that is autoloaded - gonna test now

Strangely enough, removing and re-adding the digital clock widget has fixed the timezone. I'm not sure what happened but it looks like that is resolved now...

However, I still think my polkit setup is messed up. When I view System Settings -> Actions Policy, everything is blank. Whenever I try to do anything in System Settings that requires authentication, I get the error in my thread title. Any ideas?

No idea, i don't even have that nifty kcm and edit polkit rules by hand.
Do you know what package ships it?

It's in the Arch AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php? ... -git&SeB=x

I agree it's handy, if only polkit worked.

Do you know what the "default" configuration would be to edit by hand? It's clear I'm missing some configuration, but I've added polkit and I'm not sure what else to do next.

On my openSUSE system, PolKit actions are stored at /usr/share/polkit-1/actions, and there is some additional configuration files at /etc/polkit-*. Also, make sure the system-wide D-Bus helper is available - /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.kde.polkitkde1.helper.conf on my system.

This is bug #241817

There's something severely broken on possibly even multiple levels with polkit & KDE

a) with /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 one cannot even "pkexec bash" - the call just hangs
killing that one and running /usr/lib/polkit-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 will make that call work just as killing any agent (you'll get a CLI dialog from pkexec then)

b) the "3" means an invalid KAuth action and indeed, the authAction() generated from the clock or KDM kcm reports isValid() == false, while it has a a valid name and unless somebody incredibly stupid wrote the lexer, this means that the name is not known to the polkit-1 backend or the polkit-1 backend is not in use at all. I'll figure that next.

c) running "kdesu kcmshell4 clock" leads to the very same error DESPITE RUNNING ON UID 0

Ok, the first fail here is that polkit_authority_enumerate_actions call in polkitqt1-authority.cpp does not trigger the callback.
This could even be a bug in the invoked g_dbus function.

Replacing it with the sync call "fixes" this pitfall.

However that does not fix that polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 does not come up with a dialog in that case (same or similar issue maybe? I'd have to inspect its code deeper)
Replacing it with the gnome variant however will work.

-> I'm gonna ask Dario but guess this is either a bug in polkit ... or just part of the gnome - OS strategy >-P

Thank you for looking into this. Is there any action you need from me or anything I can try? If this is a bug in KDE, is it a known issue?

> Is there any action you need from me or anything I can try?
Not necessarily. I contacted the polkit-qt author and we've a reasonable idea about *what* is broken - just not yet *why*

> If this is a bug in KDE, is it a known issue?
The bug is very much likely upstream (either polkit or even glib) but for quite sure not in polkit-qt (thus the kde polkit agent)
The only "bug" in KDE is this actually incredibly **** and nearly pointless error message - feel free to record a bug on this

Update on this:
I assume you're using the unix event dispatcher? (run "env | grep QT_NO_GLIB")

Long story short: anything related to GObject does not work unless you use the (cumbersome...) glib event dispatcher (for that process)

try:

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ps ax | grep polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
-> kill that process
QT_NO_GLIB= /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1


and check whether things work (eg. by running "pkexec bash")


I informed the maintainer (i think he is) and in the meantime, you could simply replace /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1by a shell script

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#!/bin/sh
QT_NO_GLIB= /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1.bin


and move the actual binary to
/usr/lib/kde4/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1.bin