"Authentication required to refresh system repositories" in Ubuntu 19.10

Question

If one of the users in our group tries to login to his desktop computer, he gets a popup "Authentication required to refresh system repositories". When I type in my administrator password in this popup, the popup does not disappear. It seems that only a hard reboot solves the problem temporarily, because after a few days the same popup appears again. When I login as a user with sudo privileges, though, everything works fine. The operating system is Ubuntu 19.10.

The user has no scripts running on startup, other than loading his bashrc and setting his environment variables.

I already searched the internet, but I have been unable to find a solution (I have done the most recent upgrades). I would really appreciate your help.

Answer 1

This happens when using xRDP (remote sessions or Hyper-V enhanced sessions) into Ubuntu. The remote sessions are more restrictive than local sessions for the same user, and this fixes it.

For Ubuntu 19.10, do this in a terminal

sudo bash
cd /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d
nano 46-allow-update-repo.pkla

and then put this inside the file

[Allow Package Management all Users]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.packagekit.system-sources-refresh
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes

Answer 2

On Debian my way of fixing was by adding the user to the adm and sudo group.

sudo usermod -a -G adm <username>
sudo usermod -a -G sudo <username>

After adding the to these groups it showed my username instead of Administrator

Answer 3

Not a solution to the root cause, but I have the same problem and can avoid the hard reboot by clicking maybe a hundred times on cancel in this box (I didn't actually counted). The box ends up disappearing.

Answer 4

The basics

To "refresh system repositories"

sudo apt update

To install the updates found with the above

sudo apt upgrade

If you have logged in as root (e.g. have done sudo -i) then then sudo can be skipped in the above commands.

---

There will be updates available very much depending on which software you do install. For example www.freecad.org "daily", will give you a new freecad almost daily.

Whether these ACTUALLY requires a reboot depends entirely on WHAT there was to update; In practice, I find that to be the case (almost) only as the kernel was included in the update. Anything else may be something Ansible is responsible for.

Base Ubuntu will provide new versions of installed packages quite often; when you get NOTIFIED depends on the settings you have in

-> System settings (Cogwheel and Wrench icon in 16.04 launch bar)
-> Software & updates
-> Updates (tab)
-> Automatically check for updates: Daily, Every two days, ..., Never

As always: If you Never update, the system may stay stable for long, but only until some hacker find your machine to be vulnerable due to something you didn't update.

Answer 5

I stumbled upon a workaround, which seems to work for our system, so that we do not need to update every week:

https://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=14051

(cf. Section "Fixing the issue the proper way...")

I have tried this a couple of days ago and we have not encountered any problems since then. I will keep you posted how the situation evolves.

Answer 6

I created a user account for a friend to try Ubuntu with no password and forced a password change upon login. I switched to the user account and then canceled since they were unavailable and this problem occurred. I think this issue might be due to the user password.