When root password is empty (for example on live-cd) policykit sometimes shows authentication dialog and sometimes it does not. If dialog appears it cannot be confirmed with empty or nonempty password. This happens with both polkit-gnome and polkit-kde authentication agents so I think the problem is in polkit itself somewhere. More information can be found here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=530456 Polkit version: 0.96
It's up to the authentication agent (which could be one of polkit-gnome, polkit-kde or, now, gnome-shell - or even ) to avoid putting up an authentication dialog if no information is requested - e.g. until one of the signals ::show-info, ::show-error, ::request from the PolkitAgentSession type has been emitted: http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/PolkitAgentSession.html#PolkitAgentSession.signals Notably gnome-shell's new polkit authentication agent suffers from this problem - I've filed https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643062 for it. Closing as NOTOURBUG since this fix is needed in the authentication agents.
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