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When I plug an SD card into the SD card reader (/dev/mmcblk0), a popup appears, saying:

Authentication is required to mount a device.

When I plug in a VGA cable between my laptop and an external monitor, I get:

Authentication is required to create a colour managed device.

When I close the lid, requesting the computer suspend, I get:

Authentication is required before suspending the system.

I've done everything suggested in the answers to:

And rebooted, but the same results persist.

The latter two popups don't actually prevent anything from happening -- the screen still works, and so does suspension, but I can't access the SD card until I authenticate.

If only because they're an annoyance, how can I make them go away?

My user is definitely in the sudo group, and I've edited the polkit XML files as suggested in the above questions.

Is there some way to make these stop?

the output of groups is:

cat adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare libvirtd
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  • @mchid I've edited my question -- should admin be in that list?
    – cat
    Mar 22, 2016 at 20:26
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    admin group is used for support of older versions of Ubuntu. It's useless as of now
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Mar 22, 2016 at 20:27
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    Or just add yourself to the disk group. You might want the dialout and audio groups as well. I was actually going to mark this question as a duplicate of another, about how to make policykit not prompt you for passwords, but am unable to do so, due to the bounty.
    – dobey
    Apr 27, 2016 at 20:49
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    Have you tried adding the polkit configs to /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ as described here?
    – daltonfury42
    Apr 27, 2016 at 21:52
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    if you put yourself in the root group it'll probably stop asking... but that is bad practice as you'll basically be running every app with full perms
    – wagyourtail
    Nov 16, 2016 at 3:56

1 Answer 1

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  1. If you can get a Live CD / Live USB for the version of Ubuntu you're running, boot to it and select the "Refresh system files" option. This may reset some other changes you have made to system files.

  2. For me, the problem went away when I do-release-upgraded that system from 15.10 to 16.04 -- probably because the polkit infrastructure changed and so did the configuration causing the issues.

Unfortunately, I don't know of another way to fix this without Live Media or waiting for a version change.

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