ConsoleKit

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Thu, 10 May 2007 20:34:16 -0400 Gerhard Mourani wrote:

>Thanks for the information, I want to use ConsoleKit to control user 
>permission once XFCE is loaded. User permission like being able to 
>mount, umount cdrom, usb, ipod and have permission for regular users
>to read, write into the devices. ConsoleKit seem to be the latest 
>technology from Freedesktop to do it with multiple login like remote 
>login, user seat for example, etc. GDM is a Gnome API and if I want to 
>stay with a pure XFCE + GTK2, I cannot install it as well as its 
>numerous dependencies on Gnome libraries and other. There an
>alternative for XFCE called SLIM but this one is too simple and not
>enough evaluated to understand and talk with ConsoleKit. Therefore how
>to make this upcoming standards ConsoleKit run on XFCE to control
>users permission without GDM?

I think you vastly overestimate what ConsoleKit does.  Unless I'm
mistaken, all ConsoleKit is for is:

1.  Enumerating 'sessions' running on one or more 'seats' on a physical
computer device.

2.  Controlling which session is 'active' on which seat, and letting
apps know about active/inactive sessions when asked.

And that's it.  This has nothing to do with permissions or system
policy.  I imagine that's what PolicyKit is for, though the last time I
looked at it, it was pretty limited in scope.

Xfce doesn't have any support for ConsoleKit, because it doesn't need
it.  Xfce isn't 'multi-session' aware, though it's possible to run
multiple xfce4-session instances on different logical DISPLAYs on the
same machine.  ConsoleKit would be used by whatever app manages the
various sessions, like GDM or KDM.  ConsoleKit could also be used by
normal applications, e.g., an instant messaging client could ask
whether or not the session it's running on is active or not, and set
the user's 'away' state appropriately.  The desktop-level stuff in Xfce
(xfwm4, xfdesktop, xfce4-panel) doesn't really care about ConsoleKit.

Either that, or I'm really misunderstanding what ConsoleKit is for,
which I don't think is the case.  (If it is, the CK devs could use some
better documentation and evangelism.)

	-brian