Q: When I try to reboot or shutdown my Athena machine, I get "org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.NotPrivileged Authorization is required"

Answer

This error is the ConsoleKit manager telling you (or more specifically, the LightDM display manager) that you're not authorized for the operation. The most common cause of this is attempting to shutdown or reboot the workstation when someone else is logged in (a remote user, someone on one of the virtual terminals, or in extremely rare cases, an automated job). Since LightDM does not run as root, it normally requests a reboot via ConsoleKit. If ConsoleKit sees another session, it will refuse to reboot unless the process requesting the reboot has root privileges, hence the "Authorization is required" part of the error message.

Generally, ensuring nobody else is logged in and trying again will successfully reboot or shut down the machine.

See Also

• Debathena Landing Page