My friend has recently upgraded from AntiX-17 to AntiX-19. She wants to go on using synaptic for updates because she is used to it and she finds the replacement update manager confusing. So we installed synaptic and also polkit-gnome to provide her with a polkit agent for the synaptic-pkexec script. The desktop is fluxbox.

When the agent is started by hand, it runs normally and she can launch synaptic from an icon that I created for her. But when I put it into either .fluxbox/startup or .xinitrc it apparently fails to launch. I cannot find it in the output of ps ax and synaptic cannot be launched from the icon. The synaptic-pkexec script can be launched from a terminal but this is a rather clumsy fix.

The problem seems to be fluxbox-specific. I also have AntiX-19 on a laptop with icewm as my window manager and the gnome polkit agent set to launch from .icewm/startup and it works faultlessly.

There are reports of similar problems in several distros associated with recent polkit changes but I could not find a workable solution.

Since you installed synaptic, I assume you are using antiX-19 base version.

One way would be to edit (as root) the Exec line in /usr/share/applications/synaptic.desktop file to this.

No need for policykit.

Alternatively, if you do want to use polkit, edit the startup file in ~/.desktop-session/startup - uncomment this section

You shouldn't use .xinitrc on antiX, and the global startup edits should be made to ~/.desktop-session/startup

That certainly works with icewm on my machine. I'll try it on my friend's machine next time I go round and report back.

btw that startup script line for launching the polkit agent in ~/.desktop-session has a wrong path. The agent now gets installed in /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome.

Thanks for that - I'll correct it for future upgrades.

Yes, that worked on my friend's machine too. Thanks a lot.