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Folder Sharing problem under squeeze testing

A cool feature has been added to the Squeeze (testing) debian: the nautilus folder sharing GUI (package nautilus-share). My problem was that, after upgrading from the old testing (Lenny) to the new one (Squeeze), it was definitely not working. Right clicking on the folder icons and choosing “Share Folder” gave me a:

Could not authenticate. An unexpected error has occurred.

This problem is due to the new authentication system used by Gnome, PolicyKit, witch doesn’t look to be supported in the upgrade.

All you need to do to make PolicyKit and nautilus-share work is (as root):

  1. apt-get install policykit-gnome nautilus-share
  2. make sure that your /etc/hosts is correctly configured for the localhost. It should contain something like:127.0.0.1 localhost hostname
  3. add a group called admin, add your user to this group:addgroup admin ; adduser username admin
  4. make sure /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf contains something like this: 
    <!DOCTYPE pkconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Configuration 1.0//EN"
"http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit/1.0/config.dtd">
<!-- See the manual page PolicyKit.conf(5) for file format -->
<config version="0.1">
<match user="root">
<return result="yes"/>
</match>
<define_admin_auth group="admin"/>
</config>
  5. you will probably need to restart some service, say: 
    /etc/init.d/samba restart
/etc/init.d/gdm restart

Enjoy.

If you found the pocedure useful or you have to add something, please comment.

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