On 06/08/2012 06:39 AM, walt wrote: > I just updated one of my ~amd64 machines and something in gnome is > badly broken now. I'm about to update another ~amd64 machine but > I'll do it one package at a time until I can identify the culprit. > > The symptom is that every application icon I click on starts in > the background but never appears on the gnome desktop :/ Almost > like they're being displayed on a remote X server instead of my > local machine. Weird.
Turned out to be the update of polkit from 1.0.5 to 1.0.6, which was dragged in by the update of udisks from 1.97.0 to 1.98.0. For reasons I don't know, the polkit daemon wasn't actually running. Dunno if it failed to start or somebody forgot to start it. Either way the system was broken, so I'll let the experts figure it out.
