ConsoleKit

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ConsoleKit is a framework for defining and tracking users, login sessions, and seats. ConsoleKit's primary function is to support multi-user setups. It also works for a single user, but offers no benefits compared to existing methods.

ConsoleKit is a D-Bus daemon and creates for each PAM session its own session. All applications in that session can make use of the permissions granted to this session. ConsoleKit determines if the session is local (created by a local user in contrast to users logged in over the network), and if the session is active (meaning it's the most recent session). Based on these distinctions, ConsoleKit assigns device file permissions (e.g. for audio, video and more) to the session. Other software like polkit also make use of these distinctions.

Fast user switching is a feature powered by ConsoleKit. When switching, device file permissions get changed to the new active user and applications in the old session get notified, so they can revoke grants based on ConsoleKit information.

ConsoleKit supports shutdown/reboot handling, so that only the local, active user can shutdown or reboot the system.

The planned multi-seat feature is not fully implemented. At the moment all local sessions are in Seat1, all other sessions are in Seat2.

Prerequisites

This article assumes that D-Bus has been previously configured.

Installation

Kernel

KERNEL Required options for ConsoleKit

    General setup --->
      [*] Auditing support
      [*] Enable system-call auditing support

USE flags

ConsoleKit support can be enabled system-wide by setting the USE flag to consolekit. The desktop profiles implicitly enable ConsoleKit.

FILE /etc/portage/make.conf

USE="consolekit"

Cannot load package information. Is the atom sys-auth/consolekit correct?

Emerge

The system needs to be updated if the USE variable was set to consolekit:

root #emerge --ask --changed-use --deep @world

Configuration

startx integration

To have a ConsoleKit session created when using startx to start the X server (instead of a display manager), add the following to each users ~/.xinitrc file:

FILE ~/.xinitrc

exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session <WINDOW_MANAGER>

WINDOW_MANAGER in the above example needs to be replaced by a window manager or a single application.

Starting

To start ConsoleKit:

root #/etc/init.d/consolekit start

To start ConsoleKit at boot:

root #rc-update add consolekit boot

Usage

• ck-list-sessions: Displays the details of all current sessions. For a local user, active and is-local should be TRUE.

Troubleshooting

• Gentoo bugtracker: known bugs
• ck-history: Use the --log parameter to display the logged messages.
• The ConsoleKit init.d script /etc/init.d/consolekit uses the -q parameter to suppress debug messages. Remove this parameter and restart the service to get more messages. Use also the parameter --debug to get even more messages.
• Since ConsoleKit communicates over D-Bus, D-Bus Troubleshooting may be of help.

console-kit-daemon already running

In some instances you may see the consolekit init script keeps failing, and say that it's already been running each time.

The reason for this is not always clear. The main suspect would be other init processes calling the daemon program before the it gets called.

To fix this, add consolekit to boot instead of default on init.

See also

• D-Bus - An inter-process communication (IPC) system for software applications.