Comment 46 for bug 1197395

Hi,

It's a regression in the pam module for systemd: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753882

It affects all distributions afaik and it can make any app/package using XDG_RUNTIME_DIR crash if it's used with root privileges (including dconf)...

This is a huge bug. I think the most relevant person to look into this on your side is Martin Pitt. Let us know if we can help on our side. As always we're available at #linuxmint-dev on irc.spotchat.org.

Here's a quick way to troubleshoot it:

echo $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
sudo su -
echo $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

In raring, this returns different paths. In saucy they collide.

This is because /etc/pam.d/common-session* no longer use Ubuntu's libpam-xdg-support (xdg_support.so) but the systemd pam module.

As far as I understand it from the https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753882, this isn't actually a bug in systemd, but a change by design.

We're considering solutions in Mint and we'd love to talk to you about it. We've a few ideas we can run by you and it would be better for everyone if we tackled this the same way in Saucy/Petra and got involved in the upstream discussion.