A few months ago, I updated Debian to 10. (I believe I’m using Wayland and GNOME?) Among the several problems that suddenly started occurring is the following:
Once in a while, I’ll come back to my computer, and there will be a password dialog reading “Authentication required” and “Authentication is required to refresh the system repositories”. It has a password box, a cancel button, and an authenticate button. The cancel button does nothing. If I type in my password and click the authenticate button, a “thinking” spinner pops up next to the password box…and never goes away. There’s a “Sorry, that didn’t work. Please try again.” text below the password dialog, but I can’t remember if that is always there, or if it shows up after e.g. hitting cancel. The has happened a handful of times. I think in one of the cases, hitting cancel actually removed a layer (out of several dozen) of dialogs, so eventually I was able to cancel them all? That’s only once been the case, though, and the problem happening right now (I’m on a different computer) seems not to respond to the cancel button at all.
I’ve tried googling the message, but solutions were far and few between, and were largely inapplicable – for instance, one said to uninstall “appcenter”, but Aptitude doesn’t recognize any packages containing that name. I have root access to the virtual terminals, btw. I’ve tried looking for ways to just “make the dialog go away”, via root, like looking for likely processes and killing them. Technically this has worked, but also killed my entire desktop environment, and everything I was working on.
What I’d like – well, what I need is probably a fix to make the dialog stop appearing (or at least accept cancel/password). I’d also accept a method of killing it without losing the other windows I have open. BOTH would be preferable, since the latter seems useful to have. Does anybody know either of these, or even a way of debugging the source of the issue?
