New (X)Ubuntu switched to systemd and it brought new challenges with upgrading. I use Xubuntu fork but this might affect others as well. I can’t turn off or hibernate the computer. Even after logout there are no buttons for powering off. And I can’t access NetworkManager.

This bug is known for several months and it is a big problem. Still no solution in the distribution. When you try to shutdown/hibernate/… then the only thing you get is an error message:

Failed to hibernate session
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Operation not permitted

Usual stuff like playing with polkit settings does not work. Xubuntu 13.10 freshly installed in a VirtualBox works well. There must be something wrong in /etc. So I went step by step diffing “clean” and my /etc directory.

My first discovery was a missing package xubuntu-default-settings. But it only unified the login screen.

After a very long search on my disk and on the Internet I found this bug report. Adding session optional pam_systemd.so to a file /etc/pam.d/common-session just after a line with session required pam_unix.so fixes few things. But only that shutting down does not show any error dialog. It only logs me out to the lightdm manager.

Microsoft bought Canonical or what the hell is going on?

More googling… Another old and unsolved bug. Installing the package systemd-shim solves the “only log out” problem. Almost there but not yet. NetworkManager is inaccessible after waking up from a hibernation. Fix – create an executable script /etc/pm/sleep.d/network-manager-resume with following content:

#!/bin/sh

# This script gets NetworkManager out of suspend.
case $1 in
     suspend|suspend_hybrid|hibernate)
    # No need to do anything here.
        ;;
     resume|thaw)
    nmcli nm sleep false
        ;;
esac

Is the new Canonical philosophy something like screw you upgraders (or everybody)???