Lost System Items

[Duncan]

Wilson, Richard posted on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:42:46 +0000 as excerpted:

> After a recent update, which included both the Kernel and KDE, I find
> I've lost a couple items in the KDE Menu.  When I go to the "Leave"
> menu, I have (from top to bottom): "Logout", "Lock", "Switch User" in
> the "Session" section, then "Suspend to RAM" and "Suspend to Disk" in
> the "System section".  I no longer have the "Shutdown" or "Restart", but
> I do have empty space where they would have been.  Anyone have any ideas
> what happened and how I might be able to get them back?
> 
> I am running Fedora 11 --
> 	kdebase-4.3.5-3.fc11.i586
> 	kernel-PAE-2.6.30.10-105.2.16.fc11.i686

I think Anne runs Fedora.  She should be along to reply to this shortly. 
I'm on Gentoo so can't help you with Fedora specific stuff, but here's 
some general background...

Here, most of the "Leave" menu functionality doesn't work, because I've 
not set it up to work -- my normal user doesn't have permissions to reboot 
or shutdown, I launch kde from a text login session not using *DM, and I 
don't have the switch-user functionality setup.  The normal user can 
suspend (to disk on the desktop, to RAM or disk on the netbook), but I use 
my own script and launcher for that, so I don't use the kde option for 
that, either.   I don't have  much screensaver functionality installed 
either, as all I use is the display-power-off bit and that's not a 
screensaver, so the lock functionality is disabled since it can't find a 
greeter app to give me a password dialog when I try to unlock.

Thus, the only option that makes sense is the "End session" (aka logout, 
but that's not what it does, since it just returns me to the text login, 
which may or may not still be logged in depending on whether I sourced or 
simply ran my X and kde launcher script) option.  And that one I have 
setup with a keyboard shortcut (ctrl-alt-del, reassigned to the no-verify 
version as if I hit the combo, yes, I DO want to end my kde session, back 
before Linux even existed, those keys were originally chosen as widely 
enough separated it was unlikely a user would hit them accidentally, and 
the verification is simply annoying), so I normally don't use the "Leave" 
menu at all.

The point of that in the context of this thread is that kde is hiding a 
lot of complex functionality behind those menu options -- I know as I 
don't have most of them enabled.  Behind the scenes, hal has been the 
mechanism granting the privileges to do many of these functions that 
normal users otherwise wouldn't have.  However, hal is deprecated and its 
functionality gradually being replaced by udev, policykit, devicekit, 
etc.  What I suspect happened is that the system update you did updated 
hal and/or policykit and/or devicekit and/or udev, and something didn't 
get hooked up quite right in the upgrade, so some of the options went 
missing.

With kde 4.4.0 out now, fedora will probably be updating to it reasonably 
quickly (seeing as you already have 4.3.5 and it has only been out a 
couple of weeks), and hopefully your missing options will return as it'll 
be built against whatever background components were just updated.

-- 
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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