"Adjust Date and Time" does not allow me to save the configuration

[Duncan]

Nikos Chantziaras posted on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:02:55 +0200 as excerpted:

> On 02/05/2010 04:37 PM, Duncan wrote:
>> Nikos Chantziaras posted on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:07:34 +0200 as
>> excerpted:
>>
>>> KDE 4.4 RC3.  When I try to configure the clock (by right-clicking on
>>> a clock widget and selecting "Adjust Date and Time"), I can't save any
>>> changes I make.  I'm told that I'm not allowed to save the
>>> configuration.  Sad thing is, I'm not even told why I'm not allowed to
>>> save.
>>>
>>> How do I fix that?
>>
>> Presumably you're running as an ordinary user, and you need to be root
>> to set the system clock.
> 
> I have to login to KDE as root?

I didn't say you needed to login to kde as root, and I wouldn't advise it, 
no.  Rather, I'd strongly suggest otherwise.

But ordinary users can't ordinarily set the system clock, that much is 
true.  It requires either root privs, or capacities of some sort, setuid 
tools or executables given limited additional capacities normally reserved 
for root (as is possible using the kernels capacities infrastructure, but 
I've not set it up here to do that so I'm not sure how that actually works 
in practice).

>> In theory, it should be tied into the policykit stuff I'd guess, but
>> perhaps you disabled that while compiling?  Or maybe it isn't all
>> hooked up correctly for that yet?
> 
> I don't have policykit installed.  Is that needed for clock settings?

I'm not positive about that; as I said, I don't have policykit installed 
here and don't WANT my normal user to be able to mess with the clock, but 
from what I know about it, that is, what I've read both in online comments 
and when I was looking at this new (optional on Gentoo) policykit 
dependency of KDE, trying to decide if I wanted it or not.

What seems to be the case is that where kde3 used to ask for the root 
password (or the user password if distributions had set it up for sudo 
instead of su access), kde4 is now switching to using policykit.  Beyond 
that, things get fuzzier -- I'm not sure whether specific tasks like 
setting the time are handled that way -- but that basic trend towards 
policykit does seem to be the case, yes.

>> If you need to set it from the command line interface (in konsole, or
>> whatever), try running the date command as root.  "man date" should
>> give you more information if necessary, but it's basically date
>> MMDDhhmm[.ss]. Setting the timezone is normally done by changing
>> /etc/timezone as appropriate, or something similar depending on your
>> distribution.
> 
> No, I want to set it through KDE where I also can select to get the time
> from pool.ntp.org.  The "date" tool is ugly and does not support NTP
> servers.
> 
> Or maybe I should reword it: I want to have a functional system that can
> do what it says it can do :P  So I'm not asking for help about how to
> change my system's clock.  I'm asking for help getting KDE to do what it
> claims it can do.

In that case, I'd certainly recommend installing policykit, probably 
devicekit, etc, as they're going to be getting further integrated, and if 
they aren't required for this particular thing ATM, you'll probably need 
them for this or something else, later.  That's particularly true with hal 
now headed off toward historical archive status, tho it'll be a bit before 
all the pieces (like xorg input hotplugging) depending on it move to 
something else.

But it's a bit more than that.  Quickly checking the deps here on Gentoo, 
looks like with the policykit USE flag enabled (that option on), kdelibs 
requires polkit-qt, and there's also a package called policykit-kde.  
These (presumably, I didn't verify) in turn depend on policykit itself.  
pykde4 also has a policykit USE flag.  Some of these are likely build-time 
dependencies or options that are off by default.  So just installing 
policykit isn't likely to be enough.  After that, you'll probably have to 
rebuild or install polkit-qt, pykde4, kdelibs, and policykit-kde (this one 
may well be part of kdebase-workspace for you, or even kdebase itself, if 
you're directly compiling the monolithic packages, gentoo has it split out 
separately).  Other components may in turn need rebuilt to take advantage 
of these, so you could end up rebuilding much of kde.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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