Can't close Authentication Required window after login
I am using Ubuntu 20.04(Gnome3.36) and need help with this:
The Authentication Required window is stuck right after logging in and I can’t close it. I tried using xkill to close the window but it didn’t close, I think xkill doesn’t recognize the Authentication required window as a window.
I searched for answers but only found a reddit post which the author has the same problem, which is https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/fscvql/authentication_required_window/
Is there any easier ways to remove it than rebooting?
UPDATE 2022-12-27:
On Ubuntu 22.04 I don’t encounter this problem anymore, the issue seems to be fixed. But I also can’t restart the gnome shell as I am now using Wayland.
4 Answers 4
I faced the same problem on Pop_!OS, no need to reboot actually;
The easier way is to just restart GNOME by one of two ways:
- press Alt + F2 , type r then Enter
- in terminal, type killall -3 gnome-shell
This should just restart Gnome Shell. You will not lose your open windows, but you should be reminded to save all your work regularly!
I don’t recommend the killall -3 gnome-shell approach because:
- It causes Steam and any running games within to exit.
- It has a weird side effect of bringing up new instances of GUI apps like 1Password rather than bringing up the existing minimized process.
I use the following alias ‘gf’ for "gnome fix":
For zsh and bash:
Thank you for the nice tip!
For me it started happening seemingly all of a sudden. I am on a fresh Linux installation. Other than playing around with power management (suspend and hibernate) to make them work better, I did not fiddle around with anything else. It is happening after I login from suspension/reboot.
After a couple of days of trying to understand what might be wrong, I noticed a couple of things:
- When trying to restart the window did not only display the 3 buttons Cancel, Restart, Power off BUT it stated that there is another user logged in (with the same name as me). I checked how many users were logged in but there was only one (me)
- The authenticate window popup was popping up when I was trying to reboot (with the message
Those clues led me to think that the latest package I had installed might be the culprit. It was the "chrome remote desktop" package which is related to logging the user to the current active window session and touching on display properties..
And after uninstalling the package everything worked as before! No stuck authentication popups, no duplicate ghost users and I can control my display’s brightness.
I hope those observations and my experience is useful to someone out there.
Authentication Required for everything I do in Ubuntu 19.10
I recently upgraded ubuntu from 19.04 to 19.10. Initially, I was not able to login into this user. Whenever I entered password it didn’t log in and asked for password again. There was a kind of login loop. Now I am able to login after changing the display manager to lightgdm. But I don’t know what is wrong now. After login, it keeps on asking the authentication for every possible thing. Some of them are «Authentication required to create a color profile», «Authentication required to refresh the system repositories», «System policy prevents Wifi scan» and many more. This user is already in the sudo group. Other user works fine. And I am not even able to «unlock the user in Users Settings (this solution is given at many places). Please help me.
How to fix “Authentication is required to create a color profile/managed device” on Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04
You can click Cancel to these popups or enter your password to continue, but how can you get rid of them permanently?
The Culprit: Polkit
Ubuntu uses a software component called Polkit, which is an application authorization framework that captures actions performed by a user to check if the user is authorized to perform certain actions.
When you connect to Ubuntu remotely using RDP / Windows Remote Desktop, you will see the above errors because the Polkit Policy file cannot be accessed without superuser authentication.
How to Fix “Authentication is required to create a color profile/managed device”
The safest fix to get rid of these popups is to create a new configuration file in /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/45-allow-colord.pkla .
Paste in the following:
Save and exit (press CTRL + X , press Y and then press ENTER )
This tells Polkit to continue without requiring the authentication prompt over RDP.
Now reboot Ubuntu and try logging in again over RDP / Windows Remote Desktop and the popups should be gone.
Let me know if this helped. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, or �� buy me a smoothie.
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Thank you! Worked perfectly for me on Ubuntu 20.04.
Thank you worked for me! windows 11 to Ubuntu 20
Kali Linux 2022.4
Shut down entire system
it works! Thanks!
ubuntu20 GNOME, windows10
Many thanks.
It works on Xubuntu 22 xfce desktop.
This worked for me on Debian 11 xfce desktop
worked for me on a debian 11 install when accessing xfce4 session over xrdp
Awesome! Worked on my “headless” 22.04 Ubuntu Server LTS install. i say headless cause tty1 is set to display btop++ and i have my actual gui on pts1 through xrdp :P. anyways logging into the gui was annoying cause of the error and you fixed it! Thank you!
Thank you!
Worked for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
If it’s not happening when you are remotely connecting, but locally logging in – you’ve probably installe Chrome Remote Desktop (on Debian/Ubuntu) or something similar (like NoMachine server, etc).
In that case, you’d want to disable to service while you want this behavior gone, and enable only when necessary.
In the case of Chrome Remote Desktop Host:
1. First discover if you do have the service running:
“`bash
sudo systemctl status chrome-remote-desktop@
“`
2. Assuming you did get a running and active service, just disable it:
“`bash
sudo systemctl disable chrome-remote-desktop@
“`
Restart, and see the issue resolved. You might have found other issues happening as well, not just `Authentication required to add a color device`, but also `Authentication required to restart` due to other system users being logged on (of the same name).
When you ever need to enable to service again (preemptively, of course) just do:
“`bash
sudo systemctl enable chrome-remote-desktop@
“`
Just wanted to add this here, since this is the #1 answer for search queries related to my issue; which were happening when I locally log into the actual machine.
I would be happy to buy you a big mac. For several days I have been trying to logon to Ubuntu 22 and then remote desktop using the same username without success. If I was logged onto ubuntu, I could not get RDP to run from windows with the same username. Other usernames would work. In essence the program should have just shut down the screen and I should see the screen appear on RDP. I also got the authentication messages.
Your solution solved both problems.
I have this problem when I log in *locally*, not through rdp, so I’m wondering if this fix is right for me ?
I have both those messages :
* Authentication is required to create a color managed device
* Authentication is required to refresh the system repositories
It appeared after an update a week or two before, previously this computer didn’t have this issue since it was installed 2 years ago.
It’s not required reboot….. just restart polkit service: systemctl restart polkit, that’s enough, thanks!
Still works on Ubuntu 22.04
(didn’t need this until I upgraded to 22.04)
Thank you very much for posting this solution to the issue “Authentication is required to create a color profile/managed device”. It works great. I did it on a DEBIAN 11 server.
I did this and it fixed my issue which is great. However, it’s a little bit confusing that in some of the comments there are people mentioning that it broke other functionality for them. Perhaps it would be worth explaining what the change was so that people do not read the comments and get scared off?
The original method did break some functionality. I was slow to update the guide because this stuff takes time to research and test. But the new method has been recommended on other forums and I have tested it myself on my own box.
Disabling the Ubuntu 21.04 "Authentication Required" Pop-Up?
I’d like to disable the GUI "Authentication Required" pop-up on a desktop Ubuntu 21.04 system.
The information I’ve managed to find generally points to sudo visudo and adding a line like username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL . However, on Ubuntu 21.04 at least, this only disables the sudo password requirement in terminal windows — the GUI pop-up still appears when a GUI program needs root access.